Posting Enhance Photos
In my view, enhanced photos of stamps posted by dealers are tantamount to false advertising. This practice is becoming rampant on Hipstamp and ought to be declared out of bounds for all dealers. In my experience, requests for un-doctored photos from individual dealers are not answered.
Comments
Any editing I do on my images is solely for the purpose of providing an accurate depiction of the listed stamps, which sometimes includes providing *additional scans* with exaggerated contrast in order to make a light crease, thin, gum disturbance, or tear visible. The flat straight-on lighting of the scanner does not provide for shadows that bring out surface irregularities,
While it's true, some dealers go overboard with the sharpening and color and levels correction, that is not justification for banning all image editing. Be careful what you wish for; you may end up with 90% of the listings looking like my example.
5 show a slightly different looking image. All of them are acceptable, but are obviously different from the density of particular colors to brightness and Gamma.
The only way to truly post a "perfect" likeness is to look at the curves and density numbers in the editing program. Each color (RGB or CMYK) should be within acceptable ranges and the whitest white should be less than 5% and the blackest black should be close to 100% dot density. Even doing that it is a crap shoot as to what other people will see when they look at the image on their computer.
Having said that, I am also guilty of doing some "number crunching" on images, especially to show the flaws that I mention in the description but are invisible in the raw scan. Given the fact that there is no such thing as a "color corrected" monitor (i doubt any home computer user would see the high price as worth the effort) and that the human eye sees reflected and transmitted color differently: presenting a perfect image on the internet is close to impossible. That's why using the best scanner you cam afford is important. Sorry, but 25 years in the printing industry has made me jaded...
Ted's enhanced version:
The 2nd one is my wife’s fantasy. LOL