Accessible Color Identification Discussion

Robert, I sincerely want to hear your solution. I don't understand why you haven't described it yet. Please do.

Well, it is my way of trying to standardize colour matching..I have a "colour your world" store that has a machine that will sample the colour of anything, including stamps....My store said to bring in 2 or 3 stamps and she would add a ""number" next to each colour..Now I can contact you and say get (just say) #5648 from your "colour your world" store and see exactly what the real colour of my stamp really is.

Is that making sense..?

Robert

Robert, I now understand you. I'm sorry but I don't think that will help solve the problem. No classic stamp consists of printing in only one color. Each one has multiple colors of pigment and they are distributed unevenly. It also doesn't address the problem of how to categorize shades. No two of these early stamps appear EXACTLY the same shade, but can be grouped in a manner that distinguishes each group from one another. Also the logistics of utilizing something like the local hardware store's paint matching colorimeter prevent it from being feasible.

Shot down again..oh well.

Hey Robert, Don't worry. I had a similar idea early on in my research :)

Some pigments fade or change shades faster than others. Also, haw gast they change depends on the environment they are stored in (temperature and the paper or mount material they are against, and what is in the air).

The question of whether a stamp that was printed with a particular ink (or mix of inks) should always be considered to always be that shade is an interesting one. Personally I would say no if its color appearance changes as we are calling it by a color name and not a chemical compound name thatr has that color, but I would still consider it to still have been printed with that ink (more specifically, like HDNA, I would consider it a degraded stamp).

There is another topic going on the past few days about pigeon blood pink, and I can tell you that some stamps that were once certified as pigeon blood pink have changed color to the point where at least one of the major cert services would no longer certify them as pigeon blood pink.

One more thing about using a paint store machine - the machines probably look at a relatively large area - stamps on the other do not have large areas of all one solid color. Even if we are restricting ourselves to a mono-color stamp, it is not a solid block of color. It has a lot of white (or off white) paper showing between the printed ink). Any reading would pick up both the printed ink AND the paper and not give a reading of only the ink. This is very different from a scanner which breaks the objust up into a large number of individual pixels, and which should allow the ink shade to be identified separately from the paper (theoretically).