Levels

Grayscale maps rarely use their full range. A roughness map from a scan might sit between 0.35 and 0.6, which makes the whole surface read as the same semi-gloss no matter what you do with it.

Pulling the black and white points in stretches that range back out and gives the material somewhere to go. It is the quickest way to make a height map read stronger before converting it, or to pull a heavy AO map back so it stops looking like dirt.

Should I use this on a color map?

You can, but albedo is usually the one map to leave alone. Baking contrast or lighting into it fights the renderer, which is adding its own lighting on top.

Do I lose anything?

Yes. Anything pushed past the black or white point is gone for good, so work from the best source you have rather than stacking passes.

All tools

Edge Padding: Bleed UV island colors outward into empty space so textures stop showing dark seams at lower mip levels. Runs in your browser.

ORM Packer: Combine ambient occlusion, roughness and metallic maps into a single packed RGBA texture, with control over which map goes in which channel.

Tiling Checker: Preview a texture tiled 3x3 with the seams highlighted, plus a half-offset view, so visible edges and obvious repetition show up before the asset ships.

Material Preview: Preview albedo, normal and ORM maps together on a lit sphere or cube, without exporting into Unreal or Unity to check how a material looks.

Height to Normal: Convert a height, bump or displacement map into a tangent space normal map, with adjustable strength and a choice of DirectX or OpenGL output.

Combine Normals: Layer a detail normal map over a base one and keep the detail from both, instead of averaging them into something flatter than either.

Normal Strength: Scale how much a normal map bends the light, without rebaking it. Keeps the map valid instead of breaking it the way a contrast slider would.

Flip Green: Invert the green channel of a normal map to switch it between DirectX and OpenGL, which fixes normals that light inside out.

Rough ↔ Gloss: Convert a roughness map to glossiness or smoothness and back, for assets moving between engines that expect one or the other.

Renormalize: Restore a normal map after resizing, blurring or compression has weakened it, without changing which way any of it points.

Material from Photo: Generate albedo, height, normal, roughness and AO maps from a single photo, as a starting point you then tune.

Seamless Maker: Turn a photo or texture into one that repeats cleanly, by shifting it by half and blending the mismatched edges away.

AO & Curvature: Get ambient occlusion, curvature and cavity maps out of a normal map, with no high-poly mesh and no baker, for edge wear and dirt masks.

Channel Split: Split a packed ORM, RMA or mask texture back into one grayscale map per channel, exported individually or as a zip.