Posible to convert a normal map to a specular/environment map texture?

[SmedleyDButler]

I have some textures where the normal map is actually of higher quality than the diff/spec/environment textures so I wanted to upscale those other textures to match the normals. I thought I might just be able to grayscale the normal map in photoshop, but too much information is lost in the process because the normal map doesn't actually have a wide tonal range.

 

I tried messing with individual colour sliders by hand to darken the image before converting to grayscale, and while it was a bit better, it still came out fairly rough.

 

Any suggestions on how to get the cyan/magenta to translate more faithfully into a grayscale which reads similarly to the eye as the normal map does?

[27X]

Separate one of the individual channels.

 

This is already done in several game that fake "PBR" by using PBR passes on non pbr materials, including warframe, elden ring, AndDramaDuh and Fallout to control static reflectivity, specularity and non-hdr whitepoints.

 

 

[SmedleyDButler]

13 hours ago, 27X said:

Separate one of the individual channels.

 

This is already done in several game that fake "PBR" by using PBR passes on non pbr materials, including warframe, elden ring, AndDramaDuh and Fallout to control static reflectivity, specularity and non-hdr whitepoints.

 

 

 

Oh lol why didn't I think of that... Green channel worked great in this case.

 

Thanks 27X!