LE Some help with .dds normalization issue on edited textures

[SmedleyDButler]

Howdy,

 

I'm trying to recolour a typical four-channel colour texture .dds (RGB & Alpha, though the alpha is just a flat white, so maybe I can get rid of it?), using Photoshop CS2 with the appropriate .dds plugin installed.

 

Problem is, every time I try to save, the image gets destroyed yellow-filtered, white-filtered, whatever. Obviously it's wrong.

 

I have read a dozen or more tutorials, including the ones on the Nexus wiki and on many different websites and forums. Not one of them agree! Everybody has different suggestions, different settings, and god knows what recommendations.

 

I've tried saving with 888 RGB 24, DXT3 ARGB, both versions of DXT5 (ARGB and XY), and even some of the the formats I didn't see suggested anywhere (without alpha where appropriate, though the texture I'm editing has an alpha, so I'd rather leave it in). Now, I think that's not going to solve my problem, because those are more about the compression and filesize. What's going wrong is that the normalization is going haywire. But I've tried every setting in the Normal Map conversion dialogue when saving and not one preserves the image as edited.

 

I saw one tutorial which mentioned doing a pass with the normal map filter before saving, but when I try that, that also ruins the image (and the normalization during the saving process doesn't restore it). Please tell me what it is that I'm doing so wrong.

 

Thanks!

 

Images:

 

http://i.imgur.com/ApSJTK3.jpg

 

http://i.imgur.com/f3QdfOX.jpg

 

[SmedleyDButler]

Based on some other information, I have tried eliminating normalization from the save dialogues entirely, by unchecking "Convert to Tangent Space Normal Map" and then not selecting that dialogue at all during saving, so basically my workflow when trying to save is:

 

1) Open the .PSD working file with all recolouring done

2) "Save as", selecting .dds as the file type

3) Select the right compression (I've tried DXT1, DXT3, and DXT5, not a big deal anyway)

4) Hit save (or preview 2D)

 

With "Convert to Tangent Space Normal Map" unchecked, I get a slightly different result, but basically the same issue:

 

http://i.imgur.com/ZNQt9yN.jpg

 

What is going on? Is it trying to force normalization of the texture when I save even though I'm not asking it to be normalized at all? Why?

 

SOMEBODY out there must know what's going on, I can't possibly be the first idiot who's tried to do a simple recolour of a .dds texture file for Skyrim using photoshop instead of gimp.

Edited November 8, 2016 by SmedleyDButler

[SmedleyDButler]

Well, I finally figured it out and WOW was the reason ever stupid!

 

So, when I open files in photoshop, sometimes I do so by dragging the file over the photoshop working area. Normally this is just fine - if you do this with say, a .jpg or .psd no worries. HOWEVER, doing this for .dds files seems to corrupt some aspect of the file irrecoverably.

 

When I instead opened the files the "proper" way, by using the File -> Open dialogue, everything worked perfectly.

 

I have NO IDEA why this caused a problem, but there you go. Just posting the solution in case anyone else ever has a similar problem.