Pretty Parts, CNC ribbing

I've been working with Dave Parrett at LH Thomson for the last couple of weeks, helping them get some high res images for catalog display and also for trade show booths. I thought I would share some of the latter for the circumscribed group of you that enjoy the beauty of machined aluminum. I know I do.







and, all hail the X4..



This was actually more challenging to do than you might expect.

These images are going to be printed in the 16x20 neighborhood at 100 dpi. The images they replace have some JPEG artifacts in the transitions from strict highlight to what passes as midtones. I decided to shoot RAW and to do the final retouching with the images as 16 bit Tiffs, only compressing the images at the end of the process when they are exported as CMYK JPEGS. Between that and the fact that there is no inerpolation going on to get the images up to size, I hope that the JPEG artifacts will be minimized.

Then there is dust. You can't even see some of this stuff on the black parts until you have it in the computer. I started treating each part like it was coated with the in dust while I was shooting even if I couldn't see it. That helped a lot.

Simple in appearance, but it took more effort than you'd think to get there.