Decals get old ?

The old trick often cited is to spray the decals with hairspray prior to soaking them if you're worried about them crumbling. Never tried it myself, never had any crumble either. I sold a model recently that was a good 20 years old and I got the distinct impression from the questions that the decals were of prime concern to the buyer. I cautioned him that while they look good, that can be no indication of what might happen when they are soaked in the water. He bought the kit, I don't recall if I ever saw any feedback on it - I wonder how he made out.

WmB

you didn't try any of the liquid decal films? if it's over 4-5 years old, i do it almost automatically.

Aay Men! That Micro-scale decal film or Super Scale's Superfilm is great stuff. I have salvaged some decals of U.S. Navy Squadron Insignia that were made in 1943 by an outfit called Jac-O-Lac And some old model railroad decals for my Father that dated from the late 1940s.

Bill Shuey

Now adays I also scan decals from older kits before doing anything to them, so that even if the overcoat doesn't work, I may be able to recreate them.

now that's some slavage.

Actually, I prefer PSD files but not everyone has Photoshop. I also scan at 600 dpi and _at least_ twice actual size to make it easier to draw on top of the bitmaps. I don't generally print from bitmaps since vector files can be scaled up or down with no loss of quality. Another advantage is that while I'm redrawing the decal I can correct mistakes, add detail, and change colors, etc.

What form do you save them in? Al S. says .tif is better than .jpg.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

I am not trying for gallery art photographic quality here, so I find jpeg with light compression fully adequate. GIF is also fine. GIF does not have the color shading that jpeg and tif do, but for most decals there is only a limited color range too, so gif is fine and maybe a smaller file than a tif.

===what a great idea. and not only to preserve the decals for yourself, but if you want to show it to someone else etc. And it would be easy to catalog what you have with that. I don't have a decal filing system and I have LOT of decals...

Now I have to start scanning... (you sob!) grins.

--Stephen

GIFs are so yesterday's internet ;-)

PNG is the way to go - it was developed in response to the GIF developers exercising their patents when software makers were coding GIF support in their apps without a license. According to the people that care about such things PNGs have the better file structure and are displacing GIFs in preference. Better for who, and preferred by whom - no idea.

WmB

I'll second what Al had to say about PSD files and just add that it's nice to be able to layer your artwork as you can in PSD - for instance changing squadron numbers and serials on the fly is made simple with layers. It's a good way to try out different compositions before settling on the final output and saving it to the single layer print format of your choice.

I also get some mileage out of Photoshop's cousin, Adobe Illustrator, for more complex line drawings.

WmB

PNG in my neck of the woods stands for Papua New Guinea,I didn't realise they had a graphic file format named after thier country. LOL

Never heard of PNGs but that's not surprising. Everyday I hear about something that I'd never heard - of and fumbled along without it all these years. ;)

Seriously, I do find many comics are in the .gif format. I haven't had any problems with them but I don't go trying to change anything either. I assume they work somewhat like jpegs.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

A couple of years back I needed to use some ABT decals for a client's model. ABT decals are now, what, forty years old? On top of that they tended to crumble when new, but their selection was superb.

I took all of the ABT decals that I really wanted to save, attached them to an 8 1/2 x 11 paper and took them in for a high resolution color copy onto decal paper. The end results were great. Trimming every decal is a bit tiresome, but I'm used to it.

Anybody else try this method?

Tom

Kev> > WmB wrote:

I've been skipping by the format myself on the way to the *Save* button in favor of the old standbys - gifs, jpegs and tifs. Just learned about PNGs a month ago while digging deeper into how to better animate graphics. GIFs are still king of the hill for small animated graphics as far as I can tell, but that would be beyond the realm of being useful for model decals.

WmB

Depends on the use........72dpi .jpg is fine for web use. Anything you're even thibnking of printing 300dpi or better uncompressed .tif

*if* you absolutely have to use raster. Personally I prefer vector, .dwg over any other vector format until it's time to define colors then I convert to Corel.

No. And I'm surprised. I've used Abt decals right off the paper and never ran into crumbling. I've always thought of them as really great, right up there with Stoppel. Maybe it's the climate that causes the difference. Also, I've always kept my decals in Tupperware since about

1968 OTOH, your method sounds like a good idea for your conditions. And you managed to increase the amount of available Abt decals. :)

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.