Slowly learning texturing

I have spent a decent amount of time over the last week looking over tutorials on how to texture 3D models.  I have the basics down, I think, but want to look over a few more tutorials before I start since I did spend quite a bit of time on the models.  From what it looks like the basic way to make a texturing starts with a UV-map.  This looks to take about half of the time of the entire texturing time, which is good if I am going to make several textures on one model.  Once the UVs are mapped and spaced appropriately, a UV-snapshot can be made.  The UV-snapshot is the main goal of the texturing project because it shows where the various attributes of the model are.  The snapshot is then brought into a paint program, preferably one with layers.  Color can then be slowly added to make a color-map.  A bump-map can be made by turning the color-map into a grey scale, then adding small details where the building should be more bumpy using a noise feature.  The bump-map is how the building should render non-smooth surfaces without adding each bump by hand, wasting a lot of processing time and increase the game specs with excess faces.  Finally a spec-map, short for specular, is made with another grey-scale of the color-map and then slowly altered.  The spec-map is how light reflects off of the surface of the model, I think the closer to white the shinier the object should appear.  Well this is what I have learned over the week, will probably look to spend another week or so going through a few more tutorials before trying it out on my own models.

Again, new post will be up Sunday night/Monday morning Eastern Standard Time, a day before normal.  While my schedule has not changed yet to mandate this, I am doing it preemptively.  So, until then,
~gunnah