The Power of Picture

Getting real with digital imaging

You just can’t appreciate a flitch of veneer from a 12-inch-square sample. It’s like taking a spoonful of alphabet soup and assuming the entire pot is filled with only the letters you see in that spoonful. With veneer, the color, grain, and natural markings can change dramatically just within one 10-foot long sheet. Add to that the way figure and grain can change as you move through the log and you may find that 12-inch sample is little more than a sip of the soup.

Truth is, for most architectural veneers, you need to see the whole leaf, and you need to see leaves from different parts of the log, to really know what you’re getting. Just a couple of years ago, the process of pulling sample leaves and packaging up the 10- or 12-foot-long bundle to send out for review was laborious and time consuming.

Today, it’s a snap, thanks to our high-quality digital imaging capabilities. Now we simply photograph leaves from representative bundles of every flitch we receive in inventory. When you want samples, we e-mail digital images of full-size leaves from throughout the flitch in a matter of minutes. Not little 12-inch-square peeks at the flitch, but full-size, high-quality images that are so detailed you can zoom in and read the log number off the tag.

And, what’s more, we can show how it will look mocked up in a finished panel. Our imaging system lets us create and send PDF files showing how any match, border, or other decorative technique will look using the veneer you’re specifying.

Digital sampling. It saves time. It takes the guesswork out of sampling. It even shows you how your finished panel will look. It may be virtual, but it doesn’t get any more real than this.