Extracting An Overprint Text From A Scan

I have some Bosnia landscape stamps, with 'K.u.K Militarpost' overprinted on the stamps in a few colors, such as green red, black and orange.
I am wondering if anyone on here has ever tried to take a scan of a overprinted stamp and, if you will, 'extract' just the overprint to a separate file so it could be displayed for instance on a page next to the mounted stamp, thus making the overprint easier to visualize.
One sees cancels frequently which appear to have been isolated in this way, but I have no clue how to accomplish, any pointers?

Thanks very much in advance!


Roy.

That's do-able, provided the overprint color and stamp color are sufficiently different. The steps to do this in a photo editing program aren't easy to describe without seeing the stamp.

You could also try one of the websites or software programs that are designed to do just this. For example, Postmark Reveal.

Here is an easy contrast example.



The 30 Heller green with bronze overprint is really hard to see. No wonder the overprint experiment failed!

I did try Reveal with these two examples. The result isn't quite what I hoped for. Am aiming for just the overprint to display in a separate file, Postmark reveal sort of keeps it all together.

ImageSleuth, a free enhanced retroReveal replacement is what I used here:




Not perfect, especially the green with bronze overprint, but it may be good enough for your purposes.

One caveat though, I used features found in a forthcoming version of ImageSleuth which will only be released in the next week or so.
Clive

Clive, many thanks for the link. I began to download and microsoft's security went 'bananas', but I think the result you got would work fine. The gold on green might be beyond reach. I will see if I can get it to download without issue. Roy.

Roy,
Unfortunately, without me paying for a digital certificate, an expensive option for free software, then Windows security will flag the software.

That being said, if you haven't already installed ImageSleuth then please hold off for a few days.
As mentioned above, I used a version that has not yet been released, I still need to finalise the help files and upload a Youtube tutorial before doing so. I will update this thread once it is released and also include a link to the tutorial.

Clive

Clive, very kind of you to keep me updated.
I will be interested in trying this out. For now I have defaulted to my usual setting which is "Ask Someone Younger than Me". I think I may have a possible result this weekend. That said, I have innumerable cancels I would like to do give the same treatment to.

Thanks!

Roy.