I cannot export or use any skins from HA in the game....
This was posted on the SimHQ forum by Loewenhardt I felt it was a very good question and needed a special topic for it.  For anyone looking to make their own paints using HA skins as a base will see this issue on several of my skins.

Loewenhardt writes:
"Since I have installed FCJ [This will occur in Hell's Angels as well], I am not longer able to export plane textures from inside the game (Single Player/Campaign): When I open the bmp-file, I only see completely wrong and mixed up colors. The shape of the fuselage (to example) is hard to see between these pixels. What did I wrong?"

A very good reply from Flybert...

This is because the RB PaintShop exports with baron.pal (more than half available colors covered in 255,0,255 pink/purple) attached , where custom textures use a more complete palette ...

http://www.flybert.net/mpaintips.htm

.. get FlysConvertPal.zip at the bottom of the page ..

.. the texture exported "remembers" the palette index# ... which means if your paint/image editing program ( I use PaintShopPro for this) will load .pal (palette) files, "maintaining indexes", you can likely restore it.

anyway ... use FlysConvert.pal ... Load palette "Maintaining indexes" , and you'll see it magically restore .. [Smile]

if you use "closest color match" in this situation .. you'll lose the original indexing, or IOW , all the pink will index to the one *real* pink on the palette, and can no loner be converted as above.

If for any reason you've painted on the texture and it's now been Saved as 24 or 32 bit true color (MS Paint is infamous for this), it loses the indexing data and won't convert as described above.

Thanks to Flybert for the help and Lowenhardt for the initial question.