I tried

About this image

I can't mesh edit but I really hated the pauldrons on the DragonScale armor, so I deleted them in Photoshop. After finally having the mesh use the Alpha channel, this happened. The skin is under it, I can see that when I rotate around, but it just won't show...

Any Ideas? I used a .DDS file with DTX3. DTX5 seems to have something different and I read Skyrim uses DTX5, so I suppose I should give that a try. On the Draugr armor it did work :(.

And yay for brown scales :)