High Tech Solution To Stamp Identification.

I am trying to identify the plate number on a British stamp I own. The stamp has a fairly heavy cancel obscuring part of the plate number on each side preventing an accurate ID.

Is there anyone on the forum who has experience with using light sources to negate the effect of the ink. Does anyone know of what process this would be and what the process is called. I am looking for a high tech - CSI type solution to my problem.

I am fairly certain that I have seen this process before on documentaries - but I dont remember what it is called or who might be able to do it.

Any help pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.

Thanks
Rich

Rich, can you post a scan of the stamp so that we can see what we're up against?

http://retroreveal.org/

Might help
Don

Rich,

I've got some experience in this regard. A few things to try:

1. RetroReveal, linked by Don above.
2. You could also try the app I wrote to do similar adjustments
3. If you have a scanner that will do photo negative/transparency scanning, you might try scanning in the whatever transparency modes your scanner will do. The benefit of these methods is you get an image of light passing through the stamp instead of just reflected from the face. This can often reveal hidden details.

For example, here's a regular stamp scan:



And here are some results from scanning with a scanner that will do transparency scanning.

Rick, Greetings:

I hope that y'all have more luck with RetroReveal than I ever did but, if you don't:

If the stamp is off-cover or readily lifted, I would arrange eyeball-stamp-source, and view the back of the stamp using a very bright light source.

I would also try viewing the face of the stamp under UV light, varying both the angle at which the light strikes the stamp and the angle at which your eye views the stamp.

And, I would also try viewing the face of the stamp thru a digital camera thru an IR-pass VIS-block filter (available from, for example, Hoya) under normal broadband light (eg, a traditional light bulb or, failing that, raw sunlight).

Personally, I don't expect any of these to work worth a twit.

Why?

You would need, by means of a very happy & ridiculously unlikely coincidence:

1) a chemical component in the stamp's ink to be particularly reflective of some conveniently detectable wavelength of light, and

2) the cancellation ink to be largely-non-reflective or particularly transmitting of that same wavelength of light, or for there to be lots of tiny spots where the cancellation ink is MIA.

Good luck with that, to all of us.

Absent those near-magical conditions, the obliterating ink in the cancel is going to, well, obliterate our view of the stamp.

Okay, last desperate measure if you care more about the answer than you do about ever selling the stamp: try scraping the area so as to remove some of the cancellation's ink while leaving most of the stamp's ink in place ... no, that's not impossible, because the stamp ink was deposited before the cancel's ink, so the former might have blocked absorption of the latter.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Thanks guys for your quick and informative replies. You have suggested several things I had not considered. I will check my scanner over the weekend and try some of the other suggestions.

Rich

I was able to adjust using my scanner by planning with tones, contrast and shading to identify this postmark.

Looks like you flipped the image too. Good job on seeing that cancel. Nice strip when he's facing right. Very interesting look this way though.

Hi, sometimes this works for me, watermark the stamp(s) in question, sometimes you can read the cancel from the reverse.

Stampmaster