sweet thanks alot sway. I will go play with those setting now that i can see where I made my mistakes. I also tried elizabytes way to by actually changing it it to black and white in photoshop after I render. The only way I havent gotten it to work is by grey scaleling the texture in photoshop before i apply it but your screen shot might have showed me my errors in that too i have to play around with that one more to see what I get. Thank you all so much for teaching me these techniques, now hopefully I can put them to good use and create my my image I have in mind. thank you again.