US 6 Cents Postage

Hello members,

I found in my grandfather's collection an air mail 6 cents U.S. stamp with design shift to the bottom, also is a larger teeth perforation on the bottom. The stamp has on the right side on the design a color mark or flaw, remember guys I'm not a expert. Please advice. Thank you Mara.

Not a large perforation hole, but a damaged or torn perforation. The smudge does not look like the same color as the eagle

Peter

The Eagle has landed!

Interesting variation. Collectible as such.

wert.....is that color chart something online? I would love for it to be. I have several stamps I would like to check.
Thanks,
Robert

Does anyone know of a program that will identify colors with correct stamp appropriate names? I have tried a couple of apps but the color names are not the same as those used for stamp identification. The picture above by wert names the color as numbers and letters. Not much help for telling the difference between carmine rose and rose carmine.

Stamp color names are not consistent. You have to have actual stamps to compare. Hi-res scans can help. And nothing replaces experience. There are no shortcuts or computer programs that will match colors to catalog color names. It might be possible to create a program that can help, but any color name would only be valid for a single issue with names like "C23 Carmine."

Philazilla is correct..I just colourized the smudge and stamp to show they are probably not caused by the same printers ink..Could be a smudge from another ink mixture that was on the printers fingers.

Robert

Computers typically generate 16.7 million colors**. Graphics apps 'color pickers' can select anywhere from a single pixel up to a much larger number of pixels. (Without this information, it is hard to determine just how representative the selected color might actually be.) When a 'color picker' is configured for more than one pixel, it will then average the colors to come up with a single value. But Robert's post was quite informative on a relative scale since it nicely illustrates that the red smudge is not the same color as the stamp ink.
Don

** The red smudge is made up of 1598 unique colors, the eagle is made up of at least 11,959 unique colors.

Don,

I'd like to understand that **note. Is what you are saying that the red smudge is not one of the 16.7 colors the computer has, but can only be reproduced on the computer by combining 1598 of those 16.7 million colors? If that's right, may I ask what software you used to determine that?

Hi,
Yes, you can use any graphics application to isolated the red smudge and place on a single color background like this

You can then count the colors (most graphics apps have this capability to count the numbers of colors used in an image).

You can see the large number of colors when you zoom into the red smudge to the pixel level like this (click on image below to see higher resolution image).


So if a 'color picker' is used with the default setting of one pixel, it hardly is an accurate reflection of the entire red smudge. If the 'color picker' is configured to a larger size, then the graphics app will calculate an average of all the included pixels so it can generate a single color value (out of 16.7 million). This is also how the Stamp Smarter 'Stamp Image Color Extractor' works, it calculates averages after combining similar pixel colors to come up with the percentages. http://stampsmarter.com/features/Co...Extract.html

And of course we are not discussing the actual stamp or red smudge color here, we are discussing a scanned image file which has been run through a number of various user manipulations.**

This image also illustrates how .jpg compression works. Notice the straight lines as shown here


This is what the jpg compression does, it merges 'similar color' pixels into a single color to reduce the file size and knowing that the human eye cannot detect this. The straight line above does not exist on the actual stamp, it is the result of the jpg compression algorithm which analyzes the image file and combines pixels any time you save as this file format.

This is also how the SCF image optimizer (or any other optimizer) works. In many cases you can choose how much 'optimizing' you can apply; the greater the optimization the more it will combine similar colored pixels and the smaller the resulting saved file size. Of course if you try to apply a lot of optimization it will indeed become apparent to the human eye.
Don

**At the end of the day, we are always talking about image colors and NOT the actual stamp colors. Folks never list what they did to get the image posted but rest assured that it has been through a number of various software manipulations. When you scan a stamp, there is an 'interpretation' the firmware does in your scanner and that the scanner driver applies. Then image file gets saved and more color manipulation occurs (unless the file is intentionally saved in an uncompressed format like TIFF). Often the file gets further color manipulation if the person uses a image optimizer. Then some of us grab the file with a screen capture or file save (like Robert and I did above), place it on our computer, and analyze the image. Now we are far, far removed from what the actual stamp may or may not be.

But just because our eyes do not detect this stuff going on at pixel levels does not make it meaningless. When we try to apply various graphics tools and/or start talking about deltas between really subtle image color hues for a positive stamp identification it becomes critical to understand what has gone on at the pixel level.

Ok members, what does it means the smudge on the stamp is normal or an error?. Mara

Just an indistinct smudge on a damaged stamp. Not an error or even a freak or oddity. Maybe dirt or jelly or ink likely put down way after the stamp was printed.

marapaul

I am going to give some an experienced opinion on what you probably have there...I was trained as a lithographer (printer) for 5 years..I have seen every type of printing procedures you can imagine....Remember back 81 years ago printers mixed colours with cans of ink ad a puddy knife...

When a printer mixed a designated colour and did a days run, washed up and created the same paint colour the next day, it was impossible to correctly maintain the exact colour...Paint was mixed on a hard NON porous table top.

Having said that, other colours did appear on the preparation table...As we know sheets were taken off the pile by printers to verify consistency in the printing process.

He is what I think happened to your stamp..Ink from another print process was transferred from that print and the printer's thumb/finger stained your stamp and was placed back on the pile...No more that a printer's smudge.

WHAT I don't understand is why the printer/proof reader did not notice the extreme shifting of colour and stop the process to make much needed changes.


Robert