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Scan Submission Guidelines

All stamp scans submitted for inclusion on the website need to meet two main criteria:

  1. They need to adequately display the variety.
    • Ideal stamps should be nicely centred and mint. Singles are best but I can use multiples or separate them digitally if required.
    • Cancelled stamps are also fine as long as the postmark does not cover any of the key areas of the variety or diminish the overall appearance of the stamp.
    • Please try to avoid bent perforations or excess dust and hairs on the scans. These are a distraction from the varieties we are trying to emphasize. I can do some cleanup of these issues as required.

  2. They need to fit the format of the website and my technical requirements.
    • The stamps should ideally be scanned against a black or dark coloured background. Otherwise I need to do a great deal of work to make them look right on my black pages. The complete stamp including all sides and/or perforations should be included.
    • Scans need to be at least 1200 dpi (dots per inch, or sometimes called pixels per inch) in order to work within the zoomed view system of the website. Scans at lower resolution can sometimes be adapted, but 1200 dpi is the best. Scanning at a higher resolution provides little benefit and bigger file sizes, but is still acceptable. Note that some scanners with high resolutions such as 4800 dpi sometimes do a particularly bad job of scanning at 1200 dpi where they automatically sharpen the image way too much. In this case, it is better to send me the higher resolution scans.
    • Scans can be saved in almost any format such as TIFF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, PSD, etc. Saving the images as GIF or PDF should be avoided. When using compressed formats such as JPEG or PNG, be sure to use a high quality (24-bit for PNG) setting. Including the Scott/Unitrade catalogue number in the file name is also extremely helpful.
    • Do NOT do any manipulation of the stamp image such as rotating, sharpening, colour correcting, or highlighting of the varieties. I have a workflow for doing this in Photoshop that ensures all stamps on the site have similar sharpness and colour characteristics.

Note that I can only accept scanned images that come from the originator of the scan. In other words, I need the permission of the person who did the scanning. Providing me with images obtained from other sources (such as online) could violate copyright laws.