1-St Album Page Of My 1851 3c Stamps

Don, do you think I (or anyone) is using that pdf to match colors? I'm certainly not using it for that. It is for knowing what colors are associated with what plates and what dates.

Chase and Amonette did describe their ambient lighting. . .daylight on a cloudy day. North-facing window. In order to match colors, you need actual examples. Chase was the OG expert on this stamp and created a master color chart. Reproductions of it are available. Amonette acquired that chart and expanded on it. Stamps explicitly described by Chase and Amonette exist and are (from my understanding) how anyone matches the colors today.

So the assumption is that the stamp paper and ink chemistry is staying the same over time?
Don

I guess I misunderstood your post, but I read your post as you were using that for matching colors. Your clarification makes it clearer that you are using it to understand the relationships.
Don

Of course there are changes in paper and ink chemistry over time. In the end, all our stamps are dust anyway (as are we). Does that mean it is futile to try to collect color varieties?

Not at all, I have often advocated that color study is important but take years of experience to develop a good color eye and considerable effort to build a significant color reference collections of stamps. But note that every human sees color differently. Chase and Amonette may be the 'go to' folks due to their experience but no one sees exactly the same color as their eyes did. And stating that it was a northern window on a cloudy day is not well defined ambient lighting. You cannot even determine the amount of light describes that way, how big was the window? How cloudy a day? At noon or at 4PM? frankly you would need a light meter just to definitively define something as simple as the amount of light.

Ultimately and one day there will be molecular chemistry testing which will definitively tell us what the actual ink color was when the stamp was printed. The folks doing serious color work today are building an important foundation and hopefully their color collections will remain in place until the day arrives that the total subjectiveness of color ID can finally be settled.
Don

Edit; if you want a good color ID then get a woman involved, men suck at color IDs. Women have more rods in their eyes than men do.

Send you stamps in for others to have in hand and tell you what colors you are seeing. Then reread this post

It doesn't matter that everyone sees color differently. A group of competent individuals should roughly be able to agree on naming a particular color. Color names are for the most part, quite arbitrary...

I agree that if someone posts a scan of a group of stamp, like Philazilla did, that we can have a good discussion about the relative colors being displayed on each of our monitors.

I would love to see all of the inverted Jenny stamps gathered together in the same location. Mint stamps but they each have seen various environmental conditions over the decades. We know for sure that they were all printed at the same time but I wonder how much color variance they would individually display today?

Now consider if we could view all the stamps from the same sheet of 1851 3c Stamps. Used stamps, Lord knows what kind of soak they might have had, anyone's guess at what environmental conditions they have seen, printed with a period ink (with metal content) that is notorious for changing color over time; I wonder how the stamps would look compared to each other today.
Don

Different history/storage condition can have a dramatic effect on stamp color. A competent individual is also able to recognize those stamps that have changed significantly.

I happen to think that the color of some 3c stamps is quite stable but there are some that are very difficult to maintain.

Winston,
Agreed. I am a bit unsure how 'competent' is defined...

Below is a Plate 1 reassembly, assuming that platers got things right and assuming that that the scanning was fairly accurate, and assuming that since they are all from the same plate they were all printed in approximately the same time period; are competent, experienced folks able to look at these and make conclusions based upon color?


Don

Of course. We do it all of the time. That's how in another thread I was able to almost insist on which two plates a particular stamp came from, in that case it was the 4L3.

Plate 1L was printed in tons of different colors. It is an incorrect assumption that all these plated stamps would be the same shade (or even similar shades). Plate 1L had the most variety having been in use over 5 years. Awesome reconstruction!

Those stamps would have been printed over an approximate four year period.

Philazilla,
There are a number of these reconstructions here
http://stampsmarter.com/features/SQ...ngReCon.html
Don