Photoshop: Creating a reflection map or a specular from this skin texture

maed80

I started with the diffuse, then desaturate and contrasted it with a small gamma correction to have the reflection, which is homogeneous. But i found a lot of problems for the specular: in fact, the skin intersection have to be darker, and the diffuse amount of different reds make the desaturated map full of whites and brighter area that are not corretc. I'm painting manually with a light grey this area... but for me they don't mantain the natural wrinkles of the snake...
What shoul I do?

maed80

Image i sto high this is the screenshot of thhe diffuse, scanned by Hyperscan

MmAaXx

an highpass can help to define better the edges.

maed80

all right but as you can see the difficult is to recover the spaces between the scales which are now bright and, in my opinion, need to be darker than flat top surface on the reflection map... High pass will help me to define the edges, contrast them 

maed80

thank you it's ok.!

Axi5

I like to think you spent the last 2 years working on this

maed80

no no but I forgot to thank him!