stainlessb
Member 
qaStaHvIS yIn 'ej chep
Posts: 4,799
What I collect: currently focused on most of western Europe, much of which is spent on France, Belgium, Germany and Great Britain Queen Victoria
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Post by stainlessb on Jun 10, 2024 20:41:25 GMT
Perfomaster 4000
For any users of Perfomaster 4000, I received a response this morning that the Buxsoft has ceased all development and support for this software. Stated reason was les than 1% of users made any kind of donation to the a charitable/humanitarian cause.
Sad news.
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Post by PostmasterGS on Jun 10, 2024 21:57:28 GMT
That's a shame. It's a good piece of software.
As someone who's spent a lot of time, money, and effort developing stamp apps, album pages, etc., I'm here to tell you – if you're relying on donations to fund your project, you're gonna have a bad time. "Less than 1%" sounds about right.
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stainlessb
Member
qaStaHvIS yIn 'ej chep
Posts: 4,799
What I collect: currently focused on most of western Europe, much of which is spent on France, Belgium, Germany and Great Britain Queen Victoria
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Post by stainlessb on Jun 10, 2024 22:21:37 GMT
unfortunately I am aware of nothing similar, which leaves me trying to decide whether to continue using until it simply no longer works with operating systems. It is a java app (or so it seems) The color comparator is/was what's of greatest importance. The use of CIE-L*a*b* which was saved wwas very useful. Only color apps compare to an almost infinite coloor library, but it is too varied for use with stamps, and there are limitations with sources for getting image.
PerfoMaster bypassed manufacturers scanner software (and third party) and collected as RAW data, which when saved as .png, seemed to offer reproduce-able (or very similar) results when that image was used with Perfomaster on a different system. The color "library" could be shared. as the CIE values do not change.
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Post by PostmasterGS on Jun 11, 2024 0:12:52 GMT
Looking at their website, it appears as if the donations didn't even go to them, but to a charity of their choice. That makes it more likely that they just got tired of maintaining it. I get it. When you're not getting feedback in some form – donations, emails, etc. – it's hard to justify the effort, since you never really know whether anyone is getting any use out of it.
There are other apps that can do the perf measurement thing, but the color stuff is hard to replace. That's a much harder, higher-level feature to code.
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stainlessb
Member
qaStaHvIS yIn 'ej chep
Posts: 4,799
What I collect: currently focused on most of western Europe, much of which is spent on France, Belgium, Germany and Great Britain Queen Victoria
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Post by stainlessb on Jun 11, 2024 1:02:10 GMT
The main feature for me was color
I've tried looking at the coding, but nothing umps out as "oh, here's the color garb and compare....I think it may require a decompiler....
and not one of my strong points. I'm not sure I have the patience to learn how to put together an app. Java for dummies?
I have been looking at other apps, most are geared for photo color correction or matching paint....
Hopefully I can find an alternative... I can use R G B separated images and gather data points in Gimp (or Photoshop), but it's tedious and time consuming.... and I'd be relying on the accuracy of the scanner color recognition, although it takes monitor display out of consideration
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Post by PostmasterGS on Jun 11, 2024 1:16:16 GMT
I never really used the color features. What exactly did they do, and how did you use that feature?
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rod222
Member
Posts: 10,681 
What I collect: Worldwide Stamps, Ephemera and Catalogues
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Post by rod222 on Jun 11, 2024 3:38:13 GMT
I paid for a full version in 2014 Used it about a dozen times and gave up. Found it hard to rely on results, and preferred to use the sliding scale perf guage. What I really wanted from it, is to scan multiples of the same stamp, and find perf irregularities. I was not skilled enough to do that. IT is not my strong point.  |
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stanley64
Member
Posts: 1,909
What I collect: Canada, USA, Netherlands, Portugal & Colonies, Antarctic Territories and anything that catches my eye...
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Post by stanley64 on Jun 11, 2024 6:44:09 GMT
That is indeed unfortunate, it is a useful piece of software. Myself, I had just 're-discovered' the application and was beginning to use it for measuring vignette shifts.
I will continue to use it for its measurement / centering features, along with the colour analysis for which I know no comparable...
Have fun and happy collecting! |
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stainlessb
Member
qaStaHvIS yIn 'ej chep
Posts: 4,799
What I collect: currently focused on most of western Europe, much of which is spent on France, Belgium, Germany and Great Britain Queen Victoria
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Post by stainlessb on Jun 11, 2024 14:16:15 GMT
Perfomaster beside perf measurement, centering , dimensions was the ability to select an area on a stamp and it would compare to any same/similar colors stored in the colortable (which the user would have to populate) and provide ∆E which indicates how close (or far away the selected color is from what is in the colortable, With it;s magnification option, one could get down to a very small area to select color. If no color was in the colortable, the selected color from the stamp could be saved, and then be available for comparing to future stamps.
The application bypasses scanner manufacturer software as well as any 3rd party (Vuescan) and grabs an image in what Hemann Bux (deleveloper) said was RAW data format. This RAW format image could be saved as .png or ,jpg. Because .jpg compresses the image I stopped early on using it. I tried using RAW format from VueScan (saved as ,tiff) but while I could some colors to be near exact matches to the the PerfoMaster image, other colors required changing the color settings which seemed very impractical.
The colors in Perfomaster are saved in a .config file (easily editable with any text editor) in CIE-L*a*b* format with values to the 15th decimal place (this I think is perhaps overkill as ∆E <2 are generally considered to be near indistinquishable to the human eye.
I have scanned several different year SG colour keys into the program, as well as Michel, and many stamps that don't really match either. For color nuances, I would scan in quite a few samples, then extract the CIR values and get the average values for the array and manual add this average color back. This seems to work fairly well and reduces the number of 'similar" which Perfomaster limits to 4 colors.a
I have found this software incredible useful as it allows for something with a level of repeatable objectivity.
a very useful application
Since yesterday I have been in contact several forum members, one who may well become my knight in shining armour!
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