Argentina Scott 479 Printing Question

I have two copies of this stamp, printed by photogravure, one of which is decidedly sharper than the other. Under magnification the screening looks as if it may have been different for them. Can anyone tell me whether this was indeed the case?

It is virtually impossible to tell anything about this without a picture


Peter

Here you are!

Could have been caused by a worn plate. Most commemoratives are not reprinted so I doubt this is a new printing.

Could also be bad plate wiping - I see a lot of "garbage" on one of the stamps. And thank you for posting!


Peter

Thanks to both of you shermae and Peter4522. Like shermae, a reprint resulting in a new screening didn't seem to make sense to me either, but then you never can tell what may happen during stamp production, so thought I should ask. And Peter's reply seems quite plausible too. I guess I need to get a bit more experience with identifying photogravure screening differences.

I'm not very experienced with scanning stamps. Do either of you, or anyone else, know how to get highly detailed scans giving a zoom effect to a portion of a stamp design to illustrate how stamp details look under a magnifying glass? I really would like to have done that for my scans of this present stamp we have been discussing.

One way to do that is to scan the stamp at 600 or 1,200 dpi. The files will be quite large. Load the file into an image editor. I like Irfanview a lot although it is not quite as elegant as some other programs like Photoshop. I then click and hold on a spot that is to the left and just above the image (in other words, slightly northwest of the image), and drag diagonally until the frame that is formed frames just the portion of the image you are interested in.

Once this frame is created, CTRL-y will then crop the photo down to the area of interest, which can be a very small area. Don't forget to save this new image with a unique name, or the program will overwrite your larger, original image. Hope this helps a little.

That's very helpful shermae, thank you.