Reading weak postmarks on stamps

[Bo in Finland]

Hi gurus,

I think PhotoFiltre is the right tool to filter out the hard to read postmarks on stamps. You have the function to replace colors and invert it. There is also "replace color range" that would be even better but I miss the white replacement color. The problem I think is that the stamps has a range of colors close to each other. Maybe it is possible to reduce the number of colors (256?) to make it more even before trying to remove this color.

If you read the post by greenmanor about halfway down the page at
http://www.stampboards.com/viewtopic.ph ... 0&p=219102
you will see what I try to explain.
He has got a very nice picture with basically all red colors removed except for the postmark making it much easier to read. I haven't been able to get in touch with the guy.

Has anyone of you experience in how to proceed to get similar results using PhotoFiltre?

Thanks for your kind help!
Bo (new to this nice tool)

[Tom]

Hi Bo,

i'm not a guru but just a PhotoFiltre fan.
You can get a similar result with the RVB Fantasy plugin :



But i think you had better results with different settings in another plugin : RVB layers mixer :

1°) with gray scale conversion and layers mixed in the current picture



2°) with gray scale conversion and extracted layers into separated pictures, look at the red one :



3°) you can also prepare your image before its gray conversion, by highlighting the levels :





And i hope you can try other settings and have best results .

[Bo in Finland]

Wooow!

Thanks a million Tom!
I have lot's of old letters I would like to date so this is really great!
Looking through the microscope is not any help but your tool really is.

All the best from us up in the dark cold Finland (-20C expected tonight and about half a meter of snow)
Bo

[Tom]

Thanks for all the best from you, here we had 20 centimeters of snow and while two days it was a big circus to travel.

Just a little thing for the stamps, you have also better results by talking care to the scan steps,
the red stamp, which was linked, has not a right histogram and many low lights are missing in the picture.
Enjoy with PhotoFiltre and season's greetings.