The black and white textures certainly look disgusting. However, thay have a value in that they allow accurate placement of objects to enhance visual effect or to serve as flight landmarks. The following shows an example with a trailer park and a major interchange.
Water and roads show in color because they are generated by addon programs - NuRoads textures, American Data roads, Autoasm water.
This is an overview. Certainly ilustrates how the rich color of eben synthetic textures is preferable to black&white.
The source is two 4 meter/pixel photo sets from Terraserver. I tried 8 meter/pixel but it was so bad as to be useless except for roads.
Just added a shot of KSFO using SBuilder applied color textures and Bill Gates airport elements. Looks real good. Could look better but this is only 8 meter/pixel texture. Much to boring and tedious to use 4 meter stuff except where I will be playing, which is Half Moon Bay. There I use 4 meter/pixel. Something to do until I figure out how to use the new hi-res textures. A problem since I do not have a BMP file of the FSGenesis mesh. I have most of the San Francisco area done as well as Marin County. The stuff from Terrserver is off color but you can re-balance the color quickly with Paint Shop Pro. Too bad the Autogen disappears. Manually adding that is beyond boring!
