I'm trying to modify textures for a piece of jewelry from "Expanded Jewelry Crafting" for my own use - it's the "Daedric Gold Ring" in that pack, which shows a very simple but highly shiny gold ring with red Daedric lettering on it.

All I want to do is edit the writing off of the ring so that I have a simple, plain, shiny gold ring. The ring's nif has five textures on it such as goldenring.dds, goldenring_m.dds, ..._g.dds, _n.dds, and the cubemap blacksky_e.dds.

After trying to edit the writing out of all the channels it appears on on each dds, the ring loses all of its display textures. To get to the bottom of it, I tried just opening the first dds file in photoshop, saving it without making any alterations, and then checking the model ingame again. What happens is the color texture is still visible with the lettering (that I didn't change for the test), but it loses all its reflectivity.

So I figure the problem must be in the format I am saving in. I've tried DXT1, 3, both variations of 5, and some of the 16bpp formats, but all of them cause the ring to just have the dull mat finish with none of that shininess. How do I preserven the shininess while saving the textures?

DXT format only determines the alpha channel of the texture. There is no difference between the RGB channels between DXT1 3 and 5 that cannot be attributed to randomization caused by compression loss. DXT1 has a very minimal alpha channel (that often is of no consequence), while DXT3 and DXT5 have discrete and interpolated gradient alpha channels.

What DXT format did you save the normal map (the _n texture) in originally? It should not be DXT1 since the alpha channel stores the specular map data.

Well, it was DXT5 that I saved the _n texture in. But it doesn't matter, because when I only save the regular goldenring.dds file with no alterations to it or any other files, I still lose the shininess.