Turkey Day Detail

[OctaneGuy]

Well Thanksgiving morning, I took advantage of some free time to detail this Audi S4.



Took about 4 hours.

I washed, clayed, rotary buffed, polished with PC, and finished with synthetic sealent in about 4 hours. Interior was vacuumed, all surfaces dusted, rubber trim dressed and protected. The leaf blower was used to blow out water from crevices, chrome was polished, door jams and trunk lids were dried and cleaned. Wax residue from previous detailings were found and cleaned.




Before/After photo of wheels



Paint needed to be cleaned

[SweetJazz]

That silver looks great. Good comparison shots!!

[OctaneGuy]

Thanks! Yeah, silver really wasn't my choice of color, and before this, I detailed that Mercedes E320 sitting in the garage--also silver! No matter--they both turned out great. Customers were very pleased!

Richard

[Desertdawg]

I really liked your split shots, and the finished job looks fantastic...

I can never remember where I took the first pics, so getting split shots like you did is killer...

[OctaneGuy]

Thanks! Yeah I suffered that same problem, but came up with this simple solution. Using the same painters tape that I mask off a car with:




The toughest part is in trying to keep the angles consistent from shot to shot. A tripod can help, but it's not the ideal solution unless you have several of them. I shot these handheld because the area I was shooting from was cramped for space and the widest I could go was 28mm and because my digital SLR has a 1.5x multiplier--effectively I had a 42mm lens which isn't wide at all!

So I kept the lens as wide as I could, and framed the car. I applied tape in front of my toes. I took mental notes of how I framed the car. In one case, I used a door handle to be in the center of the frame to help me line up the shot for next time.



With my camera, I can also display the picture I took, then look through the viewfinder to frame it and do a sort of comparison between what I'm looking at and a previous shot---but unfortunately it doesn't do an incamera overlay, so it's not possible to get an exact match this way.



The camera I used was a Nikon D70s with a Nikkor AF-S 28-70mm lens.

One thing I didn't do and probably should have done it for each shot was white balance. From the time I took the first shot to 4 hours later, the sun had changed quite a bit, so I had to color match the shots so they would overlay correctly. I just overlaid the 2 images, drew a selection with the pen tool, created a mask to reveal or hide areas I didn't want visible for the cut line, then used Photoshop's Color Balance feature and adjusted the colors until they were seamless. That is--the colors on the stone wall matched the stone wall from the 2nd shot.

Originally posted by Desertdawg
I really liked your split shots, and the finished job looks fantastic...

I can never remember where I took the first pics, so getting split shots like you did is killer...

[Desertdawg]

Thanks for all the tips, I need to work on my picture skills...

I use photoshop and paintshop pro all the time, thats the only way my pictures are decently framed. I usually leave the balance alone so the pics keep the actual hue.

All I have to use is an old sony, and a 2.1 olympus.

I'm going to try the tape mark method next time I detail something...

[rusty bumper]

Great job on the split "before & after" photos Richard!......Never thought of doing that myself.

Good work on the car too.

[gb387]

Very nice.... Again a big on the photos! I did a Turkey day detail on my fathers MDX and my truck last year and this is what happened the next day.