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The Lighting Editor.

An important component of all the Texture Anarchy filters is the Lighting Editor. The lights can play a large role in coloring your textures.

In fact, lighting can have more effect on a texture’s color than the Color channel. Lights can either bring out the inherent color of the texture. Or, they can blow it away with a single strong light.

A bright idea.

Lights are essential to creating the effect. Their shiny appearance can only be created with highlights, not with the Color channel.

Lights use the Bump channel to create highlights and shadows. That is to say… they fake it. Since our textures aren’t really in 3D, lights rely on the dark and light areas of the bump map to determine where a shadow should fall or how a highlight is placed.

Lighter shades of gray are viewed as peaks. Dark shades are viewed as valleys. As a light is moved around, highlights and shadows are created on either side of the peaks. If there is no variation in the shades of gray (like a single flat color), then no shadows or highlights appear.

The original texture.

Texture with a single diffused plain white Light applied.

Texture with darker Light color and position close to surface.