The Magic Librarities

I hope some of you have noticed the progress being made on scans for the board. If you have you, like I, may have wondered why there is so much difference in colors of border backgrounds and holograms.

Please look at the 2011 buy-a-box (Full box promo) Devil's Play card.
http://www.magiclibrarities.net/747-rar ... -2011.html

These were all done at one time with a single scan. Thus color/shade differences are not the result of using a different scanners or scanner settings. They were all processed with the same program (photoshop 10) with no changes in settings.

Do any of you have information on why the results would be so different? Note that the border background colors go all the way from silver to brown to gold and the holograms from dark to almost invisible.

Is there a correlation of the color shades with where the card was printed (US/Belgium/Japan?) and, I assume, foiled?

I would appreciate input on this as it really seems to be a head scratcher.

Gary

mystical_tutor wrote:I hope some of you have noticed the progress being made on scans for the board. If you have you, like I, may have wondered why there is so much difference in colors of border backgrounds and holograms.

Please look at the 2011 buy-a-box (Full box promo) Devil's Play card.
http://www.magiclibrarities.net/747-rar ... -2011.html

These were all done at one time with a single scan. Thus color/shade differences are not the result of using a different scanners or scanner settings. They were all processed with the same program (photoshop 10) with no changes in settings.

Do any of you have information on why the results would be so different? Note that the border background colors go all the way from silver to brown to gold and the holograms from dark to almost invisible.

Is there a correlation of the color shades with where the card was printed (US/Belgium/Japan?) and, I assume, foiled?

I would appreciate input on this as it really seems to be a head scratcher.

Gary

Hi Gary

When I added the scans this morning, it was not so much the background for Devill's Play, it's quite the same for all of them, but what puzzles me, is that the hologram is different on all of them. I wish, I have an answer for you, but I simply don't know. Are the Promos done in different printing facilities ?

There are foils produced from different materials that can impact on the light reflection. Maybe it's this.

Humm, a new thought. I wonder if my computer screen renders the colors different than someone else.

The way they appear to me is:

Pictures all are almost exactly the same
Holograms, very different
Background to the red trim, at least 3 shades
Spanish and German almost silver
English and French almost gold
S-Chinese very dark.

The materials idea certainly sounds like a possibility I'm just wondering why cards printed at the same location would look so different.

Does anyone know which of these were printed where?

Gary

Hello Gary,

This can come from couple of scanner issues, or from the cards itself. I'm not an expert, but knowing how the early scanner worked, I can speculate that the method hasn't changed too much.

The scanner issues might be:

1) Software compiling the scan. Scanners are bad at scanning foils. The regular scanner takes lot of smaller images and puts together a complete picture of the original. Usually if you have a crease in the paper, the scanner programming will try to make the picture as complete as possible, and removes some of the crease by compiling the area from several pieces. The same happens with areas that reflect light in different ways (holograms, foils, etc). The scanner software tries to complete the picture from several smaller pictures and depending which areas the software decides to be the best, the light source can be in different places.

With a normal office scanner I never get two similar scans of foils. And having several foils on same scan, each refract light differently. Not by much, but enough to be noticeable.

2) Light source positioning, aka the cards were in different position on the scanner plate. The light is supposed to be situated evenly over the scanner plate, but sometimes the glass, or light itself, can be bit off. This happens most often when scanning multiple cards on one go, but also if the scanner glass is dirty and one moves the card to different spot.

On the other hand, the difference can also be on the foils themselves. Then good pictures with digital camera of the cards from couple of angles might clarify this.

Humm, then by asking people to scan the same card in all languages on one plate may hurt the results instead of make a good comparrison.

The ones sent to me or I take from older scanners have far less color blotching than the ones taken with newer scanners.

Thanks much for the insight. But I guess there is no sure way, even by doing only one card per scan, of getting the same comparison one would get with the naked eye. Understandable, though, the designer of the eye did a near perfect job.....

Thanks again

Gary

An additional note;

I notice that the cards MISTER FOILCARD did came out almost identical on the holograms and colors.

http://www.magiclibrarities.net/284-rar ... -2010.html

Wish I knew all his secrets

Gary