Would love to be able to edit a material layer to change colors to a MAT (I'm guessing on the terminology). I would love to be able to recolor the beak of this bird for example. While in the material editor I can make basic changes which involve lighting for example, but would like to be able to edit the actual colors to permanently change them.

I've looked in the runtime folders trying to locate the actual mats, figuring If I could find em, I could edit them... but I cant find em!

I just highlighted the areas of concern, that wasn't an actual attempt at recoloring!

I sense mismatched terminology which will confuse things for us.

Material - is a grouping of polygons that will be colored by the same algorithm

Shader - a coloring algorithm that is loaded into a material and controls how the polygons of that material will look when rendered

Texture - an image used as data in a shader to drive coloring and lighting effects

Algorithm - a recipe for doing something in a computer - in this (Poser) case the nodes in the shader are used to assemble the algorithm

Node - the boxes connected by wires that represent the built-in functionality of the rendering engine, to be assembled into shaders as you see fit

You used the phrase "Material Layer" which is not a "thing" in the Poser you have, although it is in the upcoming Poser 11. So let's just stop using that phrase right now.

Now - since both the texture and the shader affect the beak, you can manipulate either or both to change how the beak is colored.

Isolating such changes to the beak alone may be a problem, though, if the entire bird is one material. If the beak is a separate material from the rest already, then you are free to make changes in the beak shader or the beak texture that will not alter the other materials. If not, you have the option to use the Grouping tool and change the material of the beak to be different from other materials.

If you decide to manipulate the texture directly (by editing it) you will see the change. If you can't locate the texture, you should use the Texture-Manager to see the full path. Unfortunately you cut off the screen shot of that spot so I can't tell you exactly what to click on. It's the current name of the file next to the Image_Map Image_Source. All I see is "Mac" - click that to bring up the Texture_Manager. Above the browse button, click the pulldown to list all loaded textures. You should be able to find the full path there. Then you know what to edit.

I would actually make a copy of the texture, edit that, and select the altered copy in the Texture_Manager.

If you want to change the color in the shader, there are lots of ways. Literally thousands. You need to say more to get a clean answer to that because there are so many options with different secondary effects that will happen.

The most obvious way to change the color is to edit the Diffuse_Color - it will multiply with the incoming texture, so you can change the ratios of red, green, and blue, but keep the general variations from the texture. Alter the overall brightness by changing Diffuse_Value.

I am not big on terminology either so here goes. There are a great many different ways to change a color of a material, starting with taking the texture map into your Photoshop program and modifying it in there. click on the diffuse color box and add a color value or press on the alt key and change the color in that color picker section. You can add tint by changing the color in the specular box, I say tint as this is used for highlighting, but it can change tint You can add a math function to the diffuse color such as my favorite "Blend" You can add a whole new color by using the Alternate diffuse box You can use both refract and reflect to change color, remember changes there will be light sensitive, for those of you that have read the manual and the advise not to do this , forget them directions, this is serious play time here so play...lol I do it all the time.. You can add in a translucency color and value, results can be unpredictable and fun. You can add subsurface scattering and then change the color values. You can do all kinds of crazy things I like to have lots of variations in my colors I have made all kinds of different gradients in my photoshop program to include just simple gray scales gradients to add to your colors...Sky is the limit... One more thing, you can change the color of your lighting too..

The point is this is just a few of the ways to modify color in the material room, Set the manual aside and have some fun playing with the entire spectrum of boxes and colors and values....nothing is written in stone...It's totally your sand box and you are in charge of the shovel and it's your pail so...play!!!! You can take full credit for any happy accidents or new ways of doing things. Keep one thing in mind, everything you do in the material room affects your render time, get too clever in the material room and you can increase you render time dramatically....It can even get you kicked out of poser so save before you render...