Removing camo from Textures?

[Aaronautics]

Does anybody know of a good way to remove camo from textures?
Like for example:
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/FCSK5SA.png[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Qx0yByh.png[/IMG]
[Note: These textures are from Insurgency. Just using for examples]

[Big-Iron]

well if the model includes a normal map. you could cut out the matching parts in the normal and then desaturate it and put it over top of the original, however I don't remember if the first insurgency models had normals.

[Hunter-AP]

If you're using photoshop, you can use the "select - color range" tool to select a color from the texture, then choose to replace it with another color. I'm assuming you want the texture to come out as a uniform color (EX: that armor from Insurgency having 1 color rather than camo), so simply choose to replace all the selected colors with the same color.
You can also do pretty much the same thing in photoshop by editing the green color channel to be entirely/mostly black (black color in a channel = less of that color in the final form).
this can all be done in Gimp as well, although the steps will be different.

[huzzel]

Your best bet would be using an ambient occlusion map as basis (if available). The idea with the desaturated normals works reasonably well too, especially since with an additional normal map it won't matter so much if you lose a few details along the way. Medal of Honor Warfighter for example doesn't even have diffuse maps for many meshes, the details are done via normals/speculars/gloss maps. You can copy the red and green channel of the normal map on top of each other and experiment with different blending options (multiply/exclude etc.) and brightness/contrast settings.
If you have neither normal nor occlusion map, specular maps can work sometimes too. More often than not they're just desaturated diffuse maps anyway, if you're lucky the author did it before he applied the camo.
If you really only have the diffuse map, it's a lot of work (or not so much, depending on how many details you want to preserve).

[simkas]

For normal maps, I've found that the best way to use a normal map to construct or overlay on textures is by combining different parts of the normal map. First, copy the red and green channels, turn down the brightness of each by -25 and put both as overlay on your base texture. Then, if you have the nDo toolkit for Photoshop, you can generate a cavity map from the normal map that you would then also overlay on your base texture, that helps bring out the brighter edges. Finally, take the full normal map, desaturate it and turn the brightness down by -65 and also put it as overlay over your base. I have a photoshop action made for this and I use it a lot when I need reconstruct a texture that maybe has a pattern I don't want or if I just want to enhance some of the details of a texture.