Thursday, April 2, 2015

Old glossy card yellowing

I scan a lot of cards and one thing I notice, particularly about glossy cards from the 1980s and 1990s is that the cards can yellow badly, especially on the white borders.  Here's a recent card I scanned to show the effect.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the front borders on the front and the background on the back were actually white when I bought this card. Of course I bought this card 24 years ago.  The back of this card isn't glossy so it hasn't actually yellowed. It's more turned into an off-white color. Photoshop Elements, among other things, does a great job of restoring old photographs. It also works on baseball cards.  Here's what this card looks like after using the "Remove Color Cast" tool.

Much better.  I'm scanning cards for my own use, mainly for posting on the blog.  If I were selling this card on eBay, I think it would be unethical to post the "cleaned up" version.

I also think it would be unethical to actually try to physically clean up the card for selling or for grading.

I typically do not use any Photoshop tricks on older cards, say cards prior to 1980. I wasn't collecting cards then, so I don't have any recollection of what the cards looked like when new. Besides that, the older a card is, the harder it is to clean up.

No comments: