Thank you so much Alan

Thanks Thom and Chris, that is exactly what I was looking for. It seems to be a little slow and Im having a bit of a time getting it to work efficiently in a large model but it will save me a ton of time once I work it out.
Davide, I am on a mac, I dont see a version for the mac of this software, not that I really need another learning curve right now,
Edit:
Actually after working with this I'm not very happy with it, maybe its just what Im trying to do but I fine the way it distributes stuff is very uneven. It requres so much screwin around to get it right I find myself spending so much time setting up to get the right density and then cleaning up afterwards that It is easier to make a bunch of copies then use drop.rb and randor to get the effect I want, I was hoping for soemthing faster to use.

Thanks though for the help

Thanks all

-Andrew

Thansk Remus, but no that doesnt work.

Here is the complete problem:
I have some terrain I mapped manually by tracing topographic contours and offsetting them in altitude and then used the from contours tool to make a surface.
I then took a sattelite photo, placed it on a rectangle above the topography. I exploded the rectangle then sampled it with the eye dropper and painted the topography with the photo.
So now I have the photo on the topography.
For the animation I want to use the picture.
For the renderings I want to not show the textures (the photo) and just use the colored surface, but the colored surface when in the shaded view is very dark, a dark grey. Probably something Sketchup is doing, maybe as pmiller says, taking the average luminosity of the whole photo and extrapolating a surface color.

If I follow what you are saying remus nothing happens.
Although the one thing I dont know how to do that you said:

"Click the front face colour box, change the colour, click ok.
Go view->face style->shaded"

....there is no "ok" to click. But the color sticks in the little box anyway so I think I am doing what you intend me to do correctly. It does work on new stuff, any new face that I create will be that color, but it doesn't change the existing selected face on the topography.

I have another problem pmiller, if I edit the texture in the materials window, I can only edit the original texture, I cant edit a copy.
If I duplicate the texture and edit that there is no picture, its just becomes the solid color in the materials window. So I am limited to editing the original one and if I wanna change it back I would have to reimport the picture I project from.
Forgive me if I am misunderstanding you guys and just missing something stupid, I really appreciate the help.

Probably the easiest work around would be just paint the surface the color I want to do the renderings and then paint the photo back on to do the animation. It wouldnt be that hard. I was just wondering if there was some little simple thing I was missing.
My hope was that I could quickly toggle back and forth between the surface color I want and the photo texture while I am working because I am using the photo on the topo as a guide to help position the plants and trees accurately.

Thanks again
-Andrew