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Since FS2004.com doesn't have one, I decided to make a Repainting Tutorial! I want to make it very understandable, easy and detailed, so here goes
I would like you to note that this tutorial is designed for Adobe Photoshop, and may not work exactly the same on other programs, but will give you the basic idea
Repainting Tutorial on Hand Painting - Part 1
What will we need for repainting?
- Adobe Photoshop (preferred versions 7.0 and CS) , Jasc Paint Shop Pro (7, 8 or 9) or a similar program
- An aircraft Paint-Kit (In this tutorial we will use the iFDG A320 paint kit) which can usually be downloaded from the official website of the aircraft maker, or else found on Avsim
- The Aircraft Model for testing the repaint when ready
- Photos of the real airline that we want to repaint. These can be obtained from popular aircraft photo databases such as Airliners.net or Jet Photos.net
- Official Logo of the airline. The best website for this is brandsoftheworld.com. If you cannot find the exact logo you want on that website, then it's best to search on Google for the logo or image you want.
Let's Start!
Ok, now since you know what you will need for the repaint, let's get going with it
The first thing I do for a well organised (meaning when the files aren't over the place) repaint is to create a special folder for it. For this tutorial I selected the Air Malta A320, so let's name the folder “iFDG A320 Air Malta Workshop". Inside the folder, create two more folders named “Logo" and “Photo Material" so later on we can save our logo and photos in these folders.The next thing we will have to do is to get the Paint Kit. You can click HERE to get the A320 Paint Kit from iFDG. Once you've downloaded the Paint Kit, extract it into the folder we have just created.
Now, we will need to collect some photo material for painting. In this tutorial we will not do a photo real paint, so the photos will only be as a reference. It's quite fun to collect photos. The best website for this is Airliners.net and that's where we will go. By using the search function on Airliners.net, you can easily filter the search results to only show Air Malta A320. I have already selected good photo material for you in this tutorial, however when you are doing it on your own, try to get these photos:
- A close-up and detailed tail photo
- A Close-up nose photo
- As many as possible photos showing the whole of the aircraft
- A close-up photo showing the engine clearly (This is optional, and as long as you can see what is on the engine from other photos, you won't need to bother with it.)
Here are the links to the photos I have collected for this Tutorial:
A close-up photo of the nose and Engine:
http://www.airliners....file/708027/L/
Photos showing the whole of the aircraft:
http://www.airliners....file/694699/L/
http://www.airliners....file/707429/L/
http://www.airliners....file/691297/L/
A Tail Photo
http://www.airliners....file/676002/L/
And a Nose Close-up:
http://www.airliners....file/571022/L/
Click on the links one by one, then right click and save the photos into the folder “Photo Material". When you are done, we will need to get the logo from http://www.brandsoftheworld.com
To get an airline logo from Brands of the world, you will need to scroll down to the very bottom, and enter the name of the airline in the search box. Usually pages and pages full of logos will come up, and the one you want may not be on the first page! Since the pages are ordered in Alphabetical order of the results, try to go to the page you think your result might be. For example for Air Malta, since M is just around in the middle of the Alphabet, you will have to go to just about the middle of the results.
Anyway, to prevent you from going mad on the way to finding the Air Malta logo, I have picked out the right one for you. By clicking here you can download the Air Malta logo. Don't forget to download it into the “Logo" folder we created earlier on.
Ok, now we are ready to start the painting process. Let's fire up Adobe Photoshop, or Jasc Paint Shop Pro. Note that in this tutorial, there will be screenshots from Photoshop, but only explanations for Paint Shop Pro. So if you are using anything other than Photoshop you will need to figure some things out yourself.
The first thing we will open after Photoshop or any painting program is the logo. There is no order in which files to open while repainting, but I want to explain an important fact about the logo we have taken of Brands of the world. You will see that the logo file is an EPS file. This means a lot to painters, because the very beautiful thing about these EPS logos is that you can open them as big as you want (even 3000 x 3000 pixels) and they still won't lose any quality. Nice, isn't it
When you open the EPS logo, a dialog box will appear where you can define the size and/or resolution of the file.
As I said, whatever size you give it, it won't lose any quality. Let's give it a resolution of 500 pixels/inch, and click OK. Voila! You have a crystal clear and HUGE Air Malta Logo right in front of you! Zoom in to the logo and view it at 100% to see what I mean by “Huge".
Since we will not need the logo immediately, minimize it for now. What we now need to do is to open the fuselage textures, and get them ready for painting. Firstly, Open the texture in the Paint Kit folder called “Fuse.bmp". It might look a little unfamiliar to you the first time you open it, so let me explain what the parts are with a screenshot:
This layout is usually the same in any paint kit, but can appear in different orders. There isn't too much confusion though, since it's usually clear which part is which. Now, since the texture is laid out in parts and it is not a complete fuselage, we will need to put the parts together in another file for easier painting. IFDG has very kindly already done that for us, but because this is a complete painting tutorial, I will describe how to do this. (Not every aircraft designer is as kind as iFDG
)Firstly in the toolbox, click on the Rectangular Marquee tool.
Next, drag your mouse around the first part of the fuselage to select it and hit Ctrl + C to copy it. Make sure that you select only the fuselage, and none of the purple bit. After it is successfully selected and copied go to File > New to create a new image. A dialog box will appear asking you the name and dimensions of the new image. 
Note that the default width and height in this dialog box match the area you selected. We can understand by looking at the width that each piece of the fuselage is 1024 pixels wide. Since there are two pieces of the right-side of the aircraft, we will double that size for our new image. Enter 2048 pixels as the width. The height can stay the same, but let's change it to 240 just to round it up
. Change the “Name" to Wholefuse_right.When you click ok, you'll see a long, white image. Select the Paint Bucket tool on the toolbox
so we can paint the background to a darker colour. We do this so that we don't get confused when pasting white fuselage pieces onto our new image. I like to have green as a background while painting. Double-click on the “Foreground Colour" 
part and choose a dark-ish green colour as shown in the image here. Then, since you have the Paint bucket selected, click on anywhere on the image to paint it green. Easy!Now we will paste in the two fuselage parts. We haven't copied anything else since we selected the first part, so hit Ctrl + V to paste the front of our fuselage. It will most likely appear in the middle of the image. We will need to move it to the far right of our image, so select the “Move Tool"
either by clicking on it, or by hitting “V" on the keyboard. To make things easier in the future, also click the “Show bounding box" checkbox at the top. 
Now, click and drag the fuselage piece that we just pasted to the bottom right corner of the image. The next thing we do is to paste the rear part. Reopen the Fuse.bmp file, select the right-rear part and copy it. Do the same things as the front part when pasting it into our new image. When you have pasted it, make sure all the lines match with the front part. You have now completed the first step most painters do before painting!
Now comes the more tricky part – sorting out the layers. It's not tricky once you get used to it, but might be a little hard at first.
Ok, since everything we paste gets pasted as a new layer, both the fuselage parts have become a different layer. We will want to have one layer for the whole of the fuselage, so we will firstly flatten the image to get rid of all the different layers. To do this, go to Layer > Flatten Image.
Now, go to Window > Layers so you will be able to keep track of each layer we add. You will see in the layers window that we now have only one layer called “Background". This layer will always be the main layer, and everything will go on top of it. We want the fuselage to become a different layer, so select around the fuselage with the Rectangular Marquee tool, right click, and choose “Layer via cut"
This will cut the fuselage out of the “Background" layer and put it into a new layer called “Layer 1". We obviously don't want its name to be Layer 1 so on the layers window, right click on Layer 1, select Layer Properties, and enter “Fuselage" as the new name.
Having different layers for everything is always good. Now let's make a layer to paint on. Press Ctrl + Shift + N to make a new layer, and give it the name “Paint Here". It will appear in the Layers window, above the Fuselage layer. After that, let's separate the windows from the Fuselage layer and put it in a layer that is above the “Paint Here" layer. This way we won't be able to paint over the windows by accident and it's quite useful to do this
We will do this by using my special selecting method. Every painter has different methods for doing things even though the basics are the same. My method of selecting anything that is not rectangle is a combination of the Rectangular Marquee and Magic wand.
To make a new layer of our windows, we will have to select them very precisely, without including any of the fuselage. Now, since you are most likely still on the “Paint Here" layer, select the “Fuselage" layer. My way for making a new window layer is quite easy; firstly select the rectangular marquee tool, and draw a selection around all of the windows.
Then, select the Magic Wand tool from the Toolbox,
set it's mode to “Subtract from selection" 
and set it's Tolerance to 5 click outside-the-windows-but-inside-the-selection until only the windows are selected. 
About 4 or 5 clicks should do the trick. After all the windows are selected, right click on one of the window, and select “Layer via Copy". You will see a new layer called “Layer 1" again in the Layers window. Name it “Windows" (You can name it Linux if you want though LOL!) and move that layer above all other layers.
Congratulations! You have successfully separated the windows onto another layer!
Unfortunately, the “layering" process isn't exactly over yet. The next things we don't want to paint over are the doors, and some details on the fuselage. Firstly, switch to the Fuselage layer again. Then using the same method we used for the windows, select the doors, the part where the horizontal tail sticks out
, and the red markings around some of the windows. 
Make sure that none of the windows, and the inside of the doors aren't selected. 
Then, make a new layer from them. Don't forget to name it “Doors and details" and move it above the “Paint Here" layer. At last, save the file we have done as "Wholefuse_right.psd"
Congratulations once again, because the layering process is complete!
We won't need to make any more layers just yet, and finally we can start the painting process!Thanks for reading! That is the end of Part 1, Part 2 coming VERY soon! Please comment on it, and make suggestions on how I can improve in part 2
Edited by Fssimulator, 19 November 2004 - 03:27 PM.
