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Re: one small step in the comic hobby, ONE GIANT LEAP IN RESTORATION DETECTION!!

Started by comicwiz,

39 posts in this topic

sborock

sborock

Posted
Posted

"Which New Year's Eve shows? very jealous!"

 

Almost every one of them since '82 and all the shows the nights before. You wanna get really jealous, I partied with the boys in '88 tongue.gif

 

"Did see the JGB at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. Seated about 1200."

 

Did not see those Jerry shows, but I caught 13 out of the 18 shows at the Lunt-Fontaine on Broadway grin.gif

 

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Bugaboo-migration

Bugaboo-migration

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I loved the restoration check they did at the New Years Eve show. The lawn seats sucked and had some tape removal done on them......but the pavillion seats rocked and had no color touch at all. The bad thing was that my ticket stubs had been trimmed and had a little bit of Marvel chipping on the right side of them. It also looks like they had been cleaned and pressed at some point or another.......sigh......oh well, there's always this years concert. tongue.gif

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Guest

Guest

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You wanna get really jealous, I partied with the boys in '88

 

Note to self: Don't bring any psychadelic covers to be graded in a walkthrough. May trigger flashbacks in head CGC grader, resulting in unsellable grade of "What's that Hobbit doing inside the slab? How can he breathe in there?" encapsulated in a tie dyed "transcendental grade" label.

 

 

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Illiterati-migration

Illiterati-migration

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Get OUT! (best Elaine Benes voice)

 

Holy carp. When I read that, Elaine was SAYING THAT ON SEINFELD AT THE SAME TIME. Couple that with the fact that I just bought a couple price variants today and I'm all sorts of freaked out.

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fantastic_four

fantastic_four

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I've been using a black light on and off for about the last year. There are two problems I've found with using them:

 

  • They don't seem to be useful unless you're in a dark room. The example someone gave of looking dumb by whipping out a black light at a show--I don't think that's a concern, because even the dim lighting at most hotel convention rooms is too much light to allow you to use the black light effectively.
  • A longwave UV lamp is NOT a magic tool that makes color touch detection easy. Very slight CT doesn't just jump out at you, even under a black light. You've gotta look really closely--the CT doesn't glow like the sun or anything.

Effective use of a black light is a skill that takes a bit of time and practice to develop; I'm still not very good at it. And you need plenty of material to practice on! Which means anybody who wants to learn CT detection needs to either buy books that an expert has told them are restored, or they need to buy some paint and apply their own CT to some cheapie-lowgraders and see whether it fluoresces.

 

Does anyone know if there are types of paint that don't fluoresce under UV light? Also, does anyone know whether shortwave UV light is at all useful for detecting CT? I know the stamp guys use shortwave to detect certain types of work; is it useful for comics?

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comicwiz

comicwiz

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A longwave UV lamp is NOT a magic tool that makes color touch detection easy. Very slight CT doesn't just jump out at you, even under a black light. You've gotta look really closely--the CT doesn't glow like the sun or anything.

 

My methods are: i) look over the book once (sometimes twice) very carefully with the naked eye; usually, if something has been colour touched in an amateur (sometimes even in a professional capacity) some signs show. Often, with slight amounts of colour touch, even a well suited colour match will not retain its colour well once it is applied on paper. Its hard to explain, but basically, its sometime more obvious than others because something just looks out of place; ii) if something looks suspect, I used to run it under a 1200 dpi scan; I even had this fantastic UV filter plugin, but that time bombed on me some time ago, so that's why I opted for a UV light; iii) in most cases, when I ran the suspect book, and the suspect area under a UV light, it did glow abnormally -- and when they are just tiny spots, they do stick out rather obviously. I guess it depends what is being used; my experience is mostly with diluted acrylics, watercolours, gouache or egg tempera. Although most of these come out fairly obviously under the UV light detector, my guess is that it would depend how diluted these forms of colouring agents are at the time they are applied, and how well absorbed they were by the papers that determines how brightly they glow under UV. I don't mean to profess that I know anything about detecting restoration, but I feel somewhat capable of detecting colour touch. In my experience, this UV light has helped greatly.

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MW1

MW1

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A longwave UV lamp is NOT a magic tool that makes color touch detection easy. Very slight CT doesn't just jump out at you, even under a black light. You've gotta look really closely--the CT doesn't glow like the sun or anything.

I don't completely agree. Some of the lower quality UV sources (even longwave) do not perform particularly well. I use a UVP Mineralight Lamp (Model UVGL-58). It's a multiband UV source (115 V, 60Hz, .16 amps) that operates at 254/366 NM in the UV spectrum. I purchased it from the same catalog that university physics and chemistry departments use.

 

Link to UVP's website.

 

Link to UV lamp section.

 

Using this blacklight source, I can easily detect any material alteration, no matter how small. I can also discern any chemical additives and any CT, no matter how minor. And even though black CTs do not fluoresce like other colors, they are still detectable since they often will reflect light differently.

 

Still, several other forum members are correct -- there is no substitute for experience, and such knowledge allows for the more effective use of any UV source.

 

Model UVGL-58 pictured below

uvsource.jpg

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fantastic_four

fantastic_four

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How much was that lamp you pictured?

 

And even though black CTs do not fluoresce like other colors, they are still detectable since they often will reflect light differently.
Do you mean black CT reflects normal light differently or UV light differently? Or both?
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fantastic_four

fantastic_four

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Have you ever seen a lamp that has a "viewing box" attachment? I noticed the lamp you use has a stand available to attach to it...I've seen another lamp that also had a black box with glass on the top and a place for the lamp to latch into the interior top of the box. Idea is to create a totally dark environment to view items on the go. It'd be useful at comic book conventions.

 

I really want this setup.

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MW1

MW1

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Have you ever seen a lamp that has a "viewing box" attachment? I noticed the lamp you use has a stand available to attach to it.

Yes. It worked OK, but it wasn't anything spectacular. I don't believe it was large enough, however, to adequately view comic books. It was better suited for smaller objects like baseball cards. You might have to make your own or have it custom built.

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