Eh, not ENTIRELY. The Red and Green channels provide values for shifting the light left and right over the surface. The Z values shift light up and down in the Z direction. Typically the Z channel gets compressed because normal maps don’t require a lot of definition shifting light in the Z direction (again, too much shifting would require the texture to be backlit), so scaling that value instead would not only result in incorrect lighting, but it would also reveal more artifacts as you scale up. Flattening, it would make sense to fade the Z value to 1 so it completely stops the backlighting effect, but for stronger normals you shouldn’t scale or touch it. Emphasizing backlighting is not the effect you want with stronger normals. The effect you want with stronger normals is the light shifting more to the left and right as described in the RG channels. From what I understand, the RG channels are uncompressed too, so you can get more detail out of that. For that, though, you will need to use either my method or RI3DVIZ’s method.