highlights and shadows only

I use 3ds to bake most of my clothes after I've finished with them in photoshop, and flip back and forth a few times to get things how I want them before baking them off.

what I was wondering IS, is there w way to get JUST these reflections, highlights, shadows etc as a baked texture, and not the actual clothing texture?

it would be a lot easier for me if I could pull those out and apply them over a range of colors say rather than baking out each individual color.

or if thats not possible, how on earth do you apply dodge and burn to a blank layer in PS? the only way I've found of using those so far, is on the actual texture layer itself, which if using numerous colors of essentially the same thing means redoing it for each version. very time consuming, and doesn't deliver uniform results

Do your dodge and burn on a layer filled with 50% gray and set to Overlay mode. That's non-destructive and easily copiable from one file to another, if that's what you want to do.

If we were talking Maya/Turtle, which is what I use, I'd just say uncheck every bake output except Illumination, and you'd be good to go. I'm afraid I don't have any useful experience with Max, though. Sorry. I'm betting there's a similar option in whatever renderer you're using. It's just a question of finding it.

Here's what might be an almost-as-good cheapo way way to do it. Apply a plain white material to your object(s), turn off any and all reflections, and bake. The end result will be very similar to an illumination map. It will come out a little dimmer, but it will be close enough to what you want that you'll be able to make it work.

Then, once you bring the map into Photoshop, do exactly what Rolig said. Apply it to an overlay layer. The black areas will darken the imagery underneath, the white areas will lighten it, and the gray areas will fall in between. To control the intensity, just play with opacity slider for the overlay layer.

For different kinds of intensities, also experiment with the some of the other blending modes. Soft Light and Hard Light work quite well for this sort of thing.

thanks a lot, that was exactly what I was looking for ... grins... gonna save me so much time now

You don't have the option to add SpecularMap and ShadowMap in the "Add Texture Elements" list in Render To Texture when you are baking?