Yet Another Postage Due Color Topic - J1-J28

I know. I know. I shouldn't be asking about colors. However, I figured I would do it anyway because I'd like to make a reasonable guess as to what stamps I do have.

I have 22 of the large postage dues. Scanning them and getting a consistent color image was a royal pain because my very nice Epson scanner does not always scan with the same result even when the settings are not changed. The problem I had was that when scanning a bright claret, some of the images were much brighter. If I included a brown with a claret, the brown was much brighter than if I scanned the brown all by itself. Very strange. What I wound of doing is taking one of the clarets and placing with the others and then doing scans so that the colors were consistent. I did 10 total scans.

Carving out a piece of my claret from each scan and placing them side by side gives me the following picture showing all 10 slivers of the stamp to be virtually the same color. This gave me some certainty that I am comparing apples to apples with the rest of the stamps across the scans.


The groups that follow are based on identifications made by others who owned the stamps before me.

The stamps currently identified as "brown" are here. They do look brown to me, but the 3rd, 5th, and 7th stamps have a deeper color and I suppose one or more could actually be red brown. The 7th stamp is the closest to red brown from what I can see. None of these are claret.


The stamps currently identified as "red brown" are here. There is no way these are all red brown. In fact, only the 5th stamp is likely to be a red brown. The 3rd stamp is most certainly a claret. The others are difficult to tell. None of these are brown.


And finally the "clarets" are here. The 3rd stamp could possibly be red brown? The 5th is in that direction, but probably still a claret. The rest are absolutely claret. The 1st stamp is the one I used in each of the 10 scans to get the consistent colors.


I guess I am looking for opinions really as to what might actually be red brown. I think the browns are fairly easy as are the clarets. If there is stamp in the wrong group, I've already made suggestions as to what I think, but would welcome any and all comments.

I can show full images of anything, but I figured showing the slivers together could give a better view of the color differences.

why don't you take one of each and post together? claret, red brown and brown? I think the browns 3,5, and 7 look different because their backgrounds are whiter.

Clarets fluoresce under UV. Telling brown from red brown requires having a large group and comparing them.

I will be doing UV tonight to see if the claret set is correct and if any of the red brown set are actually claret.

As for taking one of each color and putting them together... which ones? I can certainly pick a few samples. What I was trying to show is the classifications according to previous owners. The 3 groups I created are obviously different, save for a small number of individual stamps that are likely in the wrong group.

For the Browns, those 3 stamps are indeed whiter backgrounds. I can see it clearly with naked eye. Perhaps they are still considered brown.

One thing I meant to ask. On some of the stamps, at least one in each color group, the top right shading shows clear vertical strokes. Does anyone know if that has special meaning?

Not one of each color, but several of each. Like you have here.

First the UV scans. These are shortwave.

In the first picture, the top 2 are the first 2 stamps in the "red brown" row that I showed before. They are clearly not fluorescent and almost certainly not claret. The middle 2 are the first 2 stamps of the "claret row" that I showed before. The bottom 2 are stamps 4 and 5 from the "claret row" that I showed before. The middle row and bottom row stamps are clearly fluorescent. The 2nd stamp of the bottom row is less so than the others. All four of these would be categorized as claret.



In the second picture, the top 3 stamps are the final 3 stamps in the "red brown" row that I showed before. As I suspected, the 3rd stamp of the "red brown" row (the 5c stamp in this picture) is actually claret. The other 2 are not claret. The middle 2 stamps are positions 3 and 9 of the "claret row" that I showed before. The first stamp here (the 3c stamp) is not fluorescent. What you see glowing is color bleed on the stamp (full images shown below). The second stamp in the middle row is claret. The bottom row are positions 6, 7, and 8 from the "claret row" that I showed before. These are all obviously fluorescent and so these 3 are also claret.



The full image of that 3c stamp with color bleed. It is the bleed that is glowing under the UV light, not the ink of the stamp.



Here is the same stamp under longwave UV light:



For comparison here is the is the 30c stamp under longwave UV light:



What makes this nice is that if I am right, the 3c stamp in the middle of the 2nd picture here would be J17. I can only hope.

The complete longwave UV palette. These are in the same order of the two pictures of the previous post if they were stitched together.

Here's another palette with all 3 shades.

Positions are in reference to the original 3 palettes I showed.

Left to right. Brown shade positions 1, 3, 5, 7, and a new one that just arrived today. Followed by red brown positions 1, 2. claret 3 which does not fluoresce under UV light, then red brown positions 4, 5. The final 2 are claret that do fluoresce, the 1st being position 5 which had the most faint glow and position 1 which was used in all the original scans.



In short, the first 5 are considered brown. The next 5 are considered to be red brown because they are clearly not brown and do not glow under fluorescent light. The last 2 are claret because they do glow under fluorescent light.

I can remove some of these if desired.

Thought I would throw this picture here. This J7 came to me looking like the picture on the right. I thought it wasn't curable. But, only a dip in cool water cleaned it up.