how to turn scanned leather pores into bitmap CS5?

[pure]

hi

i want to scan a fine piece of leather 20x30cm (8x11") with a drumscan at
highest resolution and turn it into a twodimensional bitmap-style-image in PS CS5. in the end, it should be mapped with CGI/3Dmodelling software onto real plastic surfaces.

i want to remove all light informations, like darker and lighter parts of the scanned pores, that no light direction exists in the end, only pores from straight above viewing angle. the final resolution could be 300 or 600 dpi at 8x11". i guess about layering, and put every different structure-part of a pore (zoomed) on different layers, for example the small dots onto a layer, the dark lines onto a layer and the medium gray lines onto a layer, and so on.. in order to have full control over the structures in detail.


did you ever experience this or know a tool in CS5 which could help me?
(hipass filter maybe)

thanks!

[kav]

This is a really bad idea. I guess you could attempt to separate out the shadows and highlights, but it is not lossless. I would use an adjusted version of the image as a mask to separate the high and low points there, but again it's a bad idea. Read up on displacement maps. You'll probably just want to use one of those instead when you render. Most of those programs have some means of fine tuning there. Before that, you just want as much unique leather texture as possible. Scanning is good because you don't end up with any kind of lighting assigned to it. If the leather is naturally uneven, you can always adjust this before applying it to your model.