There is a wealth of online resources for materials that can be used for surfaces in SU. Some are very realistic. However, it often happens that they are just a bit too bright in hue to look realistic, a tad too Disney. I attach a material for cedar siding which does represent quite well what the material looks like when first fitted. But it soon becomes a greyer, duller version, and less ginger.
Is there a simple way of keeping the basic material but toning it down, ideally within SU but otherwise with an image editor (preferably not something costly like Photoshop).
Yes, I have played with the sliders but, as your video demonstrates, it is quite hard to get what you want (or I find it so).
I am on a Mac but I have used Gimp before. I will take a look at the tutorials.
At least it seems to answer the question about doing it inside SU: in theory, yes, but in practice, probably not (unless you want to spend hours fiddling with it).
I just managed to delete a list of materials by mistake in SU. It hasn’t been deleted from the SU application folder so I presume there is an easy way of reinstating it without creating a new list and painstakingly uploading the material files one by one. Is there?
I’ve never encountered that problem, but I think @DaveR most likely has it correct. SketchUp tends to restore the distribution sets of things such as required user folders, su_extensions, and materials each time it starts. You probably have only eliminated the materials from the memory of the currently running instance of SketchUp.
