Stanley Gibbons Colour Key.

Do SG still offer the colour key. I googled SG Colour Key and a Stanley Gibbons page came up, but no image of the item. More than a week ago, I emailed them, but no response.

So I put in a bid on ebay for one but it went for 30 pounds. Plus postage! That's close to double SG's price. WOW!

So if anyone has one that they don't use any more, I would welcome email offers.

Be cautious with used color guides, they have a 'shelf life' of less than 2-3 years. Buying a used one can be dicey since you have no way of knowing how it was stored. For example, it may have been left sitting on a desk as the afternoon sun came through a nearby window, making it useless.
Don

I bought one about ten years ago, against the advice of the dealer who sold it me. The dealer was correct, they are almost useless and expensive. I don't criticise Stanley Gibbons because I suspect only a swatch of colours with tens of thousands of colours could begin to be useful, and even then there are so many other factors like ageing, dirt, pollution the room lights your colour perception etc that effect colour matching. many years ago I used to work in the paint trade, I had the use of a colour swatch with 1350 colours on it we rarely had a match to a customers colour. even when we made two batches of paint to the same recipe we could not get an exact match all the time.
I paid £28.00 for my SG swatch so $30.00 for a clean swatch in it's pouch sounds good: except they don't work well.

OK, thanks, Don. Than I guess the SG small colour guide that I bought in the 1980's is nor much use now. But then it never was. Far too few shades.

To try and start identifying colours on Machins I buy first day covers and booklet pages where I can be certain what I have. If you are collecting a limited range of stamps that don't cost a lot this system can work. BUT the envelopes hae still aged, got dirty etc, but presumably so have the stamps I am comparing them with.

Part of the problem with the SG colour guide is that SG itself is not consistent in how it names shades in the catalog. Not every carmine is the same, nor is every vermilion. I've also had issues with various "blue" shades where Gibbons lists a scarce blue shade and I am holding 2 very, very different looking mint stamps for comparison. Despite the visible difference, neither stamp may be the scarce shade in question. And if not, why doesn't Gibbons list a third shade since the 2 I have are obviously very different?? They can't BOTH be the same catalog listing but yet in many cases they are. Which means, their color key is basically useless.

Sometimes, the colours look differnt in terms of whether they are a darker or lighter shade, because of the pressure of the impression used. The only time we should have c colour shade, is when we have two colours actually combined to make a new colour shade.

Please note that the correct color theory terminology is;
- Hue(color)
- Shade (hue + black)
- Tint (hue + white)
- Tone (hue + gray)

Non-colorists often misuse the term 'shade' to mean any other color, but it is easy to remember since 'shade' is self-explanatory.

'Shade' reminds me of the term 'mint' in our hobby. In our hobby 'mint' has a specific meaning but many non-hobbyists use it to mean anything that they think is in good condition.

More info here on site like this https://www.dunnedwards.com/colors/...es-and-tones

Don

cOLORPIX .COM IS A SOLUTION

Well, it certainly looks like the SG colour key is not the way to go. Thanks to all who responded.

I tried to go to colorpix.com but my browser can't find the server. Are they still in business? I do, however, see a number of difficulties with this approach. The main one would be getting RGB or CMYK values for SG and ACSC colours. Early federal Australia is my main interest. With some issues of stamps having about 30 defined colours.

I do not understand how the colorpix.com utility is any help. for example, here is a low resolution image of a 'single color' (red) stamp. It was scanned at 150 dpi and the image file is 160x191 pixels. So this image has a total of 30,560 pixels and a total of 17,263 unique color pixels.


So if I analyze this image in the colorpix.com utility, it changes the color for each pixel that I pass the 'picker' over; all 17,263 of them! First, how do I select a single pixel that represents all the colors in the image?

And even if I could pick a single representative pixel, I am only analyzing a scanned image, not the actual stamp itself. Unless I have spent much time and money calibrating the scanner, the computer setup, and saved the file in an uncompressed file format; the odds of getting a scanned image color correct is very small.

There is a color extractor (4th Tab on page) on Stamp Smarter that at least averages the colors down to a reasonable number here (even this has significant drawbacks for ID a correct color from an image).
http://stampsmarter.com/learning/Ge..._colors.html

Don

Are you looking for a color guide for Canadian stamps?

Hmmm, I have the SG Colour Key and like it very much. It has been VERY useful in helping me identify stamp colors of all countries. The only other guide out there I'm aware of is the Wonder guide, 6 cards of color splotches that are often quite different than those on the SG key. I find the Wonder Guide to be pretty much useless. I've seen nothing useful or helpful on-line so I'll stick with my SG Key(guide). A bit spendy but well worth the price IMO since the market availability for color guides is so limited.

Stanley Gibbons has advised me today that, as guessed, they no longer carry the Colour Key. Their supplier has gone out of business and they have been unable to another who can provide something similar at a reasonable price.

I think I'll contact them again and see if they have any plans to sell/publish list of colour codes for their colour names.

itma

Is this the color key you refer to?




I borrowed this image from another thread on this topic:

https://goscf.com/t/26308


I have this item. If you're interested in it send me an email.

Gettinold:

(So am I)

Reply sent by email.