Quote - transforming a bump map and a specular map with a lot of different shades of grey,black and white would be hard right?

Those types of maps are (or should) already be greyscale maps, so no effort required. Combining 2 or 3 greyscale maps into a colour image, shouldn't be much effort either as doing a channel combine is available in 2D programs like PSP, PS and Gimp (and no doubt many others).

For reference there are other potential ways of using colour images to generate multiple masks -> http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2227023