OK, I know little about these post war releases; but do these two 1953 Wings #15 cards show color difference or variation?

the top card definitely (to my eye, anyway) is a lighter color--espec. noted in the yellow fields at the top of the card, but also in the green shades. I only have one of these & it is identical to the darker lower card. I don't have many dupes of any other numbers to compare if other cards show variation. A couple uncut sheets might be helpful--anyone?

It doesn't strike me as simply "fading" from the dark to the lighter card.

mark- cool stuff, i often wondered about these printing variations..or are they? here is one with a few from the roundup set, check out the wording, one is white the other is yellow? a variation? rare? common?, this is an area of nonsports that is rarely catrgorized, unlike baseball...

I say neither are variations.

Keep in mind that the quality control for cards during this time is quite minimal. When printing cards they use a 4 color process called CMYK (which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black). Every color you see is broken down into these 4 basic colors. Each of these colors are semi-transparent and are printed in layers to create the final product. If you keep these processes in mind you can see how these seeming variations occur.

The Wings card on the top looks like the yellow printing pass was very light (someone was falling asleep at the press as you have to continually add ink during the process to keep the colors bright). This results in ALL of the underlying yellow across the whole card to be muted and gives all of the colors a differnt shade because it does not have the full yellow component of the colors printed.

In addition they have to line up the four color plates perfectly or you start getting poor image registration. In the Roundup card you can see where the yellow plate had started to shift to the left resulting in the "ghost" effect of yellow in the lettering (look along the left edge near the border of the bottom card and you can see an edge of yellow peeking out).

Here is an illustration of what I was talking about. This is an actual separation of the top Roundup card. These are the 3 main color separations with the black included to make them stand out better:

Hello to All ,

A few more cards to show how the printing process went wrong .

hey todd- great info, thank you...