I'll post this here too ![]()
Just wanted to say I added a Photoshop Actions file to the bottom of the material tutorial index page: http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materi ... rials.html
Or if you like you can get it here:
http://philipk.net/tutorials/materials/ ... ctions.atn
The action package file contains these actions:
- Normal map overlay fix with the blue channel preserved
- Normal map overlay fix with the blue channel killed
- Flatten to new layer
- Normalize
- Sharpen
There are two different normal map overlay actions, the one where the blue channel of the normal map is preserved gives you the most correct result mathematically, however it is a bit harder to work with since it requires two layers with different blending modes. I only use this for normal map overlay layers that have a lot of depth in them, and I usually even just mask out such details and use the "Normal" blending mode instead.
The other one kills the blue channel (50% gray bucket fill), this is no problem to use on subtle normal map overlay layers as they hardly contain any visible blue channel information anyway, and these are the details you usually want to overlay anyhow.