Is ther a good download of photoshop out ther for free. I would like to try and start doing some skins for my planes. Just to experiment with.Or can someone send me a copy of what they are using to do skins with. If so send it to... goose81z@yahoo.com . Thanks

You should try Gimp as an open source, free and legal download. All the same basic features, plus.

http://www.gimp.org

Darn, just went and read docs; it does not support .bmp or .tga yet...read Hawk's post below.

I would suggest you take a serious look at a Photoshop-like application called GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/).

It has all the tools you would ever need for skinning, it can read/write Photoshop file formats, and it's FREE!

You can easily convert your GIMP-based output files to .bmp or .tga format using another program call irfanview (www.irfanview.com). I use an Adobe application called Fireworks for most of the skinning I do, but Fireworks does not handle 8-bit .bmp file compression very well, so I often resort to using irfanview to write my final .bmp file output.

Thanks guys. I downloaded both Hawk but now I need to learn how to use them. One of these days I need someone to get on TS and walk me through a skin edit or something so i know how it works.

Me three.

I haven't done much skinning, but doing skins is almost exactly the same way that I shade my profiles. Basically you create new layers above the flat unshaded image (or void) and then select the part you want to shade using the seection tool (Wand or lasso). .. go to a new layer and then do your work there .. this is akin to putting transparencies over a drawing and working on each transparency. When done you can vary the opacity of each layer as well as add or remove detail as needed.

I found there was a huge learning curve when I went from Photoshop 3 and 4 up to PS7, so you are probably better off with one of the free programs

As an alternative, I offer Paint.NET. You can find this program absolutely free of charge at http://www.getpaint.net.