Insimenator.org

Hi all,

I apologize for not giving this a better title, but I don't know what to call what I need.  I have been learning some tricks to recoloring clothing and adding textures.  My question is about detail in a clothing item, details in the sense of how people add little wrinkles in the clothing to make it look more realistic, like small wrinkles around the crotch of pants that makes them look like real pants that someone is wearing as opposed to those perfectly smooth garments that look cartooney (sp?).  When a garment is plain colored, I have no trouble adding the texture I want and laying it over the original and getting the wrinkles to show and make the garment look more real, but when I am working with a printed item, I don't know how to get rid of the other persons print and still be able to make the recolor layer transparent enough to show the wrinkle details that make a garment look so real.  So my questions are:

1.  How do I add a pattern or color over an existing garment with a pattern and make it transparent enough to have the wrinkle effect show through without the original texture pattern showing through?  Example, original was a zebra dress with some wrinkles to make it look real, I want to turn it into a leopard dress, but I don't want the zebra stripes showing through, however, I do want the wrinkle effect of the dress showing.

2.  Some textures are very dark (even without patterns) when you adjust the hue and saturation to get the gray scale to color over.  I know I can lighten this, and with some textures it works just fine, but if the texture is too dark, I often get either a grainy look or I lose a lot of resolution in the detail on the garment.  How can I make the gray scale light enough to color over without it turning the lighter color that I want into a darker shade?

If anyone can undertand this and can help or direct me to help, I would greatly appreciate it.  
Thank you all so much,

Mickey

After writing this, I saw this post by Beosboxboy.  I am referencing how to use a shadowing overlay AFTER someone has done a skin and added something to it like the basketball shirt in BBB's picutres.  How do I get rid of the previous shirt texture so that won't show through on my recolor.  Is there some kind of library somewhere with shadowing overlays to use?  Again, thanks for any help anyone can give.  The post by BBB that I am referencing is here:  http://www.insimenator.org/showthread.php?t=2272

Again, thanks!