Quote - I understand the theory of what you're saying completely, it's not that it's complicated.  It's that you know where you want these maps to go from zero to one (in grayscale) and the texture artist does not.  The texture artist has the technique to paint the maps and you do not (you said it yourself).  Getting those two sets of information coordinated into a finished product will either be slow, or expensive, or bad (unless you're really, really lucky),

You must mean that the artist doesn't know what shade of gray to use, not that they don't know where the freckles should be stronger versus weaker or non-existant, right?

And my point is here is the shader. Build a mask, and try it. If it looks too weak, make the mask brighter. If it looks too strong, make the mask darker.

Also, the Blender.Blending value controls the overall strength. I myself did not do a good job with the map intensity, but who cares? I simply increased the strength to 1.5 and it works. The absolute level of the map is not important, as the shader parameters can easily deal with maps of differing maximum luminance. What is important is the overall pattern, and that is something that I expect an "artist" (i.e. somebody who can look at real life and then see the pattern and mimic it in a drawing) should be able to do.

Nobody needs to send me their map for testing. You test it. When you're done and it's perfect, then by definition it's perfect. I'm not involved.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)