Manuscript cancel on Italy stamp?

It is definitely written in pen. The postage stamp was almost certainly used to pay some fiscal tax.

rex
I like your version!

A few examples.






Italian taxes canceled with a pen, it was a fairly common use.

If there is an inscription about the place of residence, then it is unlikely that this is a tax cancellation!

With a passport, the most important thing.This, perhaps, is the necessary cancellation. Need a passport photo from Italy in 1927)))

The handwritten cancellation on Russian stamps looks a little different, but who now knows how the post office used to work?

Although the discussion of the cancellation in this thread is interesting (for what it's worth, I also vote for a handstamp, given how uniform the colour / strength of the ink is, including areas like the 'c' or the 'o' where a pen would have travelled back and forth over the same piece of paper during cursive handwriting).  But I'm most interested in the skill shown in isolating the cancellation from the stamp image.  Please describe how you've done such an excellent job at that!

Ryan

You can do the same with Gimp. But for sure the isolated cancel pic shown by Jeff is well-presented! When I used Gimp, the results were nowhere as nice as his pic.

I haven't used it in years, so I don't remember the exact location in the menus, and I don't have it installed on this laptop.

But the process is the same. In Gimp, you can select an area of color (in this case, you would choose the most solid area of the black manuscript cancel. Then you can filter either that "color" from the image or filter out everything except that "color". To isolate a cancel or overprint, you would choose the latter. Adobe is too rich for this cheapskate, so I don't have Adobe. But I assume the basic process is the same -- Adobe probably has a lot more parameters you can play with.

I originally tried it many years ago using Gimp on scans that had weak cancels. The results were not that good for me (RetroReveal is much quicker/better). My eventual intention was to use Gimp to isolate overprints and sharp cancels, but never got around to doing it. I would venture to say that is something that WERT would have been good at doing.

Somebody on this board probably has Gimp installed and knows how to use it. Hopefully they can chime in and point out the correct menus/submenus to do it in Gimp.

Gimp does have a learning curve. That's one of the reasons I stopped using it. It was just too much trouble each time I wanted to try to do something new/advanced. It is powerful, just have to put the time into it. I'd rather push around little bits of colored paper...