Aero Art

I know… What is it? 

Surely you should be able to guess. It is seven rotor stages of an axial flow compressor section for a jet engine.

So what is that?

Answer: Each one of the colored blades are in reality little airfoils or wings. As they are rotated they air across opposite airfoils that do not rotate and comprise the stator stages and are not shown. At the end of compression fuel is introduced, combusted (like a blow torch) and the hot gases exhaust across a number of turbine stages that look similar to the compressor section. This section is in turn connected by a shaft to the compressor section to keep the compressed air coming. Finally the exhaust leaves the engine as thrust. As the air flows along the longitudinal axis (front to back) rather than around the rotating axis like a turbocharger, it is classified as an axial flow compressor.

The real short answer: It is a totally rad supercharger.

The original image was taken at the Virginia Aviation Museum of a sectioned engine display. The fun part photographically was working with the image in Photoshop. I was working on it last night in Richmond VA knowing I had to get up early this morning to catch a flight to Little Rock AR but once I got into it… Well you know what happened there… Tonight Show, Late Night… It wasn’t mush after that when I hit the pillow.

The process was pretty basic but time consuming. A the lighting was not that good at capture, I had to hand hold with the aperture out to f/2.8 which is in no way favorable for a long field of focus. This basically took the magic wand and quick selection tool and trashed them because they were very confused. The most exact selection I could do was employ the Polygonal Lasso Tool and feather the selection one pixel.

So I ended up with seven layers each with one stage of compression. The problem with extracting a section and then turning the layer back on is there is that little selection line (from the feathering) that is present. After each selection, I turned the extracted layer back on, Made the original layer active and cloned in over the feathering line. Brainless activity late at night.

Finally I made a color adjustment layer and applied it to the specific layer beneath it and changed the blend mode of the adjustment layer to Color. This allowed the shape, and shadows of the blade to come through. Overlay just did not do the job right, but as often the case, youu flip through the blending modes until it looks right.

There you have it. Take care and enjoy a nice weekend.

Cya… Doug