The Most Terrible Forgery I Have Seen Today.

NSK - in 1995, I bought my first personal PC (I had been using computers at work for years before that) with the intent of buying/selling stamps on Auction Web (the pre-curser of ebay), and bought a version of Photoshop to help with that. It allowed me to manipulate my stamp images. One tool in the SW was the 'fill' option - select a color, put your curser on a spot in the image and 'fill' - all adjacent pixels within a certain range of colors to the pixel that was clicked on will be turned into the selected color. Take a scan of a stamp on a black background, select Black, click on the 'black' background of the scan (which was invariably not quite completely black, and which had all kinds of non-black spots - like dust - throughout) and the background becomes pure black. It made the scan look much neater and more presentable. If you clicked 'fill' a few times in the same place of the scan, the black would bleed, pixel-by-pixel, into the stamp. Some of the pixels between the 'white' of the stamp paper and the 'black' of the background would be somewhere between the two colors. Clicking on 'fill' once causes some of those edge pixels to turn 100% black - a new picture is made, again with some edge pixels being something other than 'white' or 'black'. Click 'fill' again and some of the 'new' edge pixels get converted to the fill color. Doing 'fill' once looks good - all kinds of sellers do this - but click it 2 or 3 or 4 times and it has a noticeable effect on the original image. The multi-click causes the edge of the white to appear to be 'nibbled' away ever so slightly. The more multi-clicks you do, the more 'nibbled' away the stamp will appear. The multi-click may be done on purpose, or completely by accident.

I say this because, to me, it looks like that is what happened with the obverse image of the QV 1-sh in the Stamp Thailand ad. I would be willing to bet if you were to flip either image about a vertical line and superimpose one image over the other, the LOCATION of the perfs would align. And that the obverse image ALWAYS fits inside the reverse image (that's why I think the obverse image has suffered from the multi-click, while the reverse image has not). Another effect of the multi-click is that it will slightly change the shape of the border between white and black, a pixel at a time. The multi-click fill results in the exact appearance seen in the obverse scan. The result for stamp scans is that it can make the perfs look 'fake' like we see here.

ETA: the two images in the ad are NOT doing this seller any favors! A knowledgable collector would likely not touch the offer with a ten-foot pole! The perfs DO look hinky. I suspect it is only the scan that is hinky, though.

Mooter - Very interesting and of course you are correct. You can see the design from the back, and it is the same stamp.

Possible, but he did this to almost each and every perforation and shortened the stamp.

I've seen some pretty poor NSW forgeries over the years, but this one takes the biscuit.

NSK, when I had a bunch of stamps, I sometimes would mount them all on one page, scan the page, process the page (blacken the background, sharpen the image, reduce/increase contrast, etc), then split the page into the separate stamp images. It was a pain, but seemed easier to split one image into 50 than to scan and process 50 separate images. In this case, he may have done the same, flipped them all to scan their reverses, processed, then split the reverse images into individual stamp images. He over-processed the reverse images all at the same time.

There is unprocessed, under-processed, well-processed, and over-processed. There is such a fine line between each of those. This guy, however, has so completely over-processed his reverse images (I think) and I can't believe he looked at what he did and said, "That's OK". Whenever I over-processed my images, I would start over. And my images never got to the point that this guy's reverse images are at. Except when I was goofing around or experimenting.

Agree with mootermutt, the 1/- weird perfs is just from an overprocessed image. The short and long perfs do match up in the back and front images. I'll guess that the overprocessing was a result of trying to eliminate the staining that's visible on the back.

This is one of the "worst forgeries" of Rb1a that exist, but there is more to the story of why it exists.

Does anyone else know what that story might be?

Jim

https://www.ebay.com/itm/234709837720

Wasn't it because they were also illegally used for postage ?

Bids going on (e bay) for this stamp.Italian office in China (Peking).
Forged overprint.



Genuine below:

Repairs might be considered a type of forgery (altering with intent to defraud). This terrible one made me laugh.
It sold on the internet today for a whole $3.13.

ZebraMan: just curious; what altering do you see?

Whole LR corner is a different stamp. That is pretty amusing.

You would think that if they were going to that much trouble, they would have used the sharpie to cover up the rest of the second stamp... :)

A US #39 (forgery) that got damaged and someone added parts of a different stamp at the right side and top right corner. This one blends in pretty well. I was so focused on trying to figure out what was going on with the rest of the stamp that I didn't notice the repair at first.

I have one of those #39 fakes as well. Same forger. I don't know who made them though.

edit: I'll have to see if mine grades higher than yours. Mine's not too high quality either.