New Software For Analyzing Stamps

For those of you who like to write software, here's a program I'd love to see. It is designed to remove colors from a (stamp) image, one by one, so that you can study a cancellation or overprint more easily. The end result would be a white perforated area with only a cancel or overprint showing; everything else has been removed, and that image could be saved, emailed, printed, etc., perhaps with a thumbnail of the original stamp down in the corner for reference.

I realize that some stamps have black as a printed color; those areas/lines could be manually removed with an eraser-type tool. One feature you don't want is a slider that works on wave-lengths, i.e., first removes red, then orange, then yellow, etc. Sounds convenient, but there might be a case where you want to remove only red and green from a stamp, and that would not be possible (?) with a slider. Instead you would have 10 to 20 buttons, each removing a certain color, plus extensions for its various hues and shades.

Does this sound useful to anybody?

Hi Doug



You do not need that. If Windows, all one needs is a color control like MS Office.

Isn't there some thing already in place using one of the Photo Editor type software already available? I believe I remember seeing an article where someone did just that. I'll have to check it out.

Jerry B

That wouldn't be an easy project. I looked into the possibility at one time, but it was already easily doable with Photoshop, so it wasn't worth the effort.

Here's the method I use to achieve a result similar to what you're looking for.

Looking at your method Postmaster there is a slightly more complicated method but the results are better.
It involves channel splitting, either into RGB or CMYK which some image editing software can do.

Example

That's OK, but it's not quite what I described for the end product -- a white rectangle (the stamp) with only the black remaining; easier to see and analyze IMO than "white on black."

Once you have the black image (bottom-right) you just invert the image

Why you do not try the Postal Fragment Analyser?

http://www.lcs-chemie.de/poststfa.htm

nice.

That looks like a useful program, but the scope of my software idea is much broader. There's many more things to investigate on a stamp than merely the postmark. One of the most critical would be examining for bogus overprints without a lot of background color and design to try and see around.