2c Color Nomenclature For 219-D/220 And 267/279B The Same?

hello,

I began to looking deeper into the colors of those mentioned 2c stamps. As there is no color guide available anymore (White, Scott) about US stamps (old topic, I know...), I tried to figure this out in looking at auction photos and here at SCF at the scans. There are images of the color guides here at SCF:
- 219D/220: https://goscf.com/t/27195&whichpage=2#233467
- 267/279B: https://goscf.com/t/27321#234318

I wonder if the Scott color nomenclature for those issues is always the same, if for example the carmine color or the pink color is - more or less - the same for all issues above.

I am not sure about this, as the two examples in the links above are quite different - of course this is due to the difficulty of making scans/photos and showing them online, we don't have to discuss this here. But they help me though.

So my question about those colors is:
- are the colors (=the color guide pages) of those two issues quite different, so is it correct that the links above show different colors for the same color names? or should they look more similar, and so they are?

By the way I always have my doubts about the carmine color. All carmine stamps that I have, show a totally different color than all color examples in any color guide (Wonder, SG, Michel). Seems that carmine was at the beginning a really specific red, and later, for example in the Washington Franklins, just became a normal red, but was still named carmine.

Hi stamperix,
How do you know if the scans that people posted are accurate and/or did not have post scanning processing done upon them?

Over in the Canadian section we have had issues with image manipulation; it has gotten to the point where much time can be saved by first determining what has been done to a posted image before trying to answer questions about stamps.

What is the value of comparing images? While I love Siegel website, some of the colors rendered in their images are awful; I think that that they use some post-processing which in some way affects the colors.

And my Windows 10 computer is configured to change the display between 8PM and 5AM. It turns off much of the 'blue' of the display backlight, making the screen much 'warmer' for night time viewing. So how colors look on my screen depend upon the time of day I am looking at them!
Don

I just hope that there are some SCF members here who have a good and calibrated monitor (with external hardware) as I do have, so that we can talk about how accurate the RGB colors are that I showed in the links above.

In addition my question was first if the nomenclature, so the colors, are the same in the two issues.

Having a calibrated monitor is meaningless if you have no idea how the image was generated or if some image 'filter' was applied after scanning. (This includes people reducing the number of colors in order to get an image to meet the file upload size requirements of this forum.)

We also have no idea how accurate/old/faded the original poster 'color guide' was when he scanned it. Color guides have a shelf life of two years (and only if they are stored correctly).

This hobby has no color standards and never has; so publishers can use whatever nomenclature they desired. Color names certainly vary between publishers and they can also vary over time from the same publisher.
Don

Does not matter how the images was made, the images are there and can be evaluated by trained eyes.

I just ask if anybody with a color management hardware and knowledge about the stamps (= in his album, in his hands) can give this opinion, which of the images is closer to reality.

And my second question has no relation at all to color&computer, but is only if the nomenclature, and so the colors, are meant to be the same for 219D/220 and 267/279B.

The current 'color' status of our hobby is abysmal; in my opinion published color standards and catalogs are doing more harm than good. Published color charts are ephemeral just like stamps, the inks undergo chemical changes over time. So they have a shelf life of less than 7-10 years (most color standard companies recommend they the standards be replaced every 2-3 years). Additionally, to publish a quality color chart is extraordinary expensive over typical book publishing. And adding to the 'color frustration' is the fact there our hobby has no standardization on color names. What one catalog calls out as 'rose red' another might call 'pink'.

Any time you see someone trying to define a color while failing to defining ambient light conditions you can safely assume they are clueless. Anyone with a basic understanding of how we see colors understands that our eyes only perceive the reflected color of an object. It is the reflected wavelengths that we see; what appears black to us is an object which absorbs all the wavelengths. An object which appears white to us is reflecting all the wavelengths. So one of the most important criteria in color determination is ambient light. An object can drastically appear a different color by simply changing the ambient light conditions.

Our hobby's reliance upon 'color' for identification is a bad joke. For stamps, there is only a single way that I know of that we will ever be able to identify a stamps' true color; chemical molecular analysis. Doing anything 'optical' is tilting at windmills since it is common knowledge that inks change over time. For example, if you used a spectrophotometer and Fourier transform techniques to retrieve spectral information on a stamp today and then ran the same exact analysis in 10 years, you would get different results. And frankly even a chemical molecular analysis would change over time but at least the ink chemistry changes can be understood and predicted. The current challenge with a chemical molecular analysis would be to figure out a non-destructive test method.

Folks who study stamp color should stay the course in building reference collections until our hobby comes to grip with all the decades of misinformation that have been peddled. One day we will be able to accurately define and understand stamp colors but we are nowhere close yet.

Lastly, we should also keep in mind that we all have different levels of 'color deficiency'. Men are much worse at determining colors than women and our age also impacts our ability to detect colors. So thinking that old men have correctly identified stamps colors is a large assumption. For example, if we polled our forum community on 'color deficiency' we would find a wide range of capabilities. Here is a simple color test that folks can take that show how bad we really are at determining colors. https://www.xrite.com/hue-test. I used to be a color matcher in a textile mill but I know that my eyes have deteriorated over the years, I scored a 3.

So even if you hosted a big party and all of us went to your house to view the colors on your monitor, we would get all kinds of discrepancies and opinions on the colors we were viewing.
Don

Thanks again, Don, we had this topic several times now :), and that's why I wrote in my initial posting this should be not become a thread about "color in the philatelic world".

It's true that everybody sees colors differently if it's about definition of a lonely item, but color comparison in opposite is pretty easy. that's just what PF and PSE do. And if you have a color management in your hardware and a trained eye and standardized light, it's not a problem to compare, for example, a stamp in your hand, with the stamp shown on your monitor. In addition, my printer is also color calibrated with a certain paper, and I can print 1:1 what I see on my monitor. It's not so difficult at all to manage the colors in the digital world :).

So what I asked above, just how good the images in the links are, and if it's normal or wrong that they are different from each other, so if the carmine of a 220 is similar to a 250 or 251, or really different, and which of the images in the links shows this better.

---
Just made the test you mentioned, thank you very much! That really interesting, as it does not only test the person, but also the equipment :). Believe it or not, I scored 0.

I scored a zero too. Must be my relative youthfulness...

I just tried the test, but scored a 2. By their measure my weakest range for color discrimination in their color wheel is the range 28-29, for which I scored a 1 for each point (0 elsewhere). This is in the range of blue with small increments of red beginning to appear. This correlates with the trouble I have in distinguishing ultramarine from other close shades of blue, and why I have so much trouble detecting the slight addition of pale blue to make pink in Scott 64, 64b etc.




For as much discussion as we have had about the 2c stamps of the 1890s and the problem of color recognition and naming, I am very surprised at what stamperix is now saying. In particular he has omitted any mention of the more recent published work on the 2c of 1890, which has color chips and discussion of the problem. That has been referenced here more than once. I see no reason to start the conversation all over again. Why would he/we do this? Something new?

Sorry, if I didn't see or read something related to this topic which would answer my question, at least I didn't find an answer to them, otherwise I would not have asked my questions.

I don't want to discuss the colors of the 2c 1890s in detail, only asked a little question about the quality of the shown images in the mentioned links.

Please don't misunderstand me; questions are fine, and we do invite them. However, the best questions are those based on a fair amount of digging in the archive for prior discussion that may be relevant. I get it that there are times when that doesn't get anywhere, or just confuses things more. C'est la vie.

Never fear asking a question.

The Straw Man

I really like the search button here, and as you can see in my first post, I gave references to old topics, however, my questions were not discussed there. At the end it would be the best, if each collector had all literature and color guides at home, but it's not the case. So I just tried to fill the last gap of color questions I have. To my eyes, the images for the 219D/220 colors are much too colorful, while the image for 267/279B seem - if I compare to my stamps - to be pretty close to the real colors. If this is the case and the nomenclature for both issues is the same, I know that the other images are not as good for comparison. This would help me.

The relative size of the color chip vs. the surrounding white/gray white will throw off your color perception. The same goes for blown-up stamp images that show more white paper between the printed lines. It might be better to view the color chip with a black piece of paper with a hole cut for the color chip, but have stamp on a white piece of paper.

Color nomenclature for US stamps I believe is based on Scott by convention. You've already found SG and Michel call red and carmine different shades from each other and Scott. IF I remember right, SG also kept old color names for certain stamps that do not match their colour key; unique British Guiana #23 certainly is not on SG colour key magenta paper.

Okay, back to the OP. The colors in the posts as appearing on a calibrated monitor do not (for example) match White perfectly. The scans are close enough to be useful in my opinion. I think the basic colors are separable in the scans: carmine, lake, rose, red, pink. Then you can go from there to establish a more exact shade, e.g., rose carmine. So the original of that color guide looks to be accurate and matches White quite well (in my opinion again). Note that White is not complete, lacking #279Bh vermilion, for example.

And the names of major colors/shades are arbitrary, of course; there's still a very close range of shades around whatever basic carmine is defined as in whatever reference you have. And where do you draw the line between light carmine and pale carmine, for example? You can point to examples given in color guides, but there are intermediates between those 2 shades, too.

White is consistent in color nomenclature between the small banknotes and also with 2c Washingtons. I would expect (demand) any reference to be consistent that way. I think all the 2c Washington carmine listings are a simplification -- there are a lot of shades around basic carmine that add up to an issue just being called "carmine".

EDIT: essayk and don: those are good scores. I got a 3 also. For comparison, I did only the first line and left the rest as is and got a 78.

This test was interesting, I did score a zero. Very surprising as I am otherwise blind as a bat. I do have a decent monitor though and I did re-arrange them many times. Guess I am now a blind color expert, send all your stamps to me. Sadly I have the same trouble as most collectors. Given a range of varieties of shades, I could arrange them, but still wouldn't know what color or shade to classify them as.
This exercise has made me realize the importance of a reference collection. Even harder are colors prone to oxidation.

I made a 6, worst result in my age /gender was 1676...yikes.