CPC General discussion thread (7 Viewers)

[GianThaMan]

-Some molds are listed as recommended for hot-stamping and I'm aware that some molds can not be hot-stamped. If a mold doesn't say it is recommended is it still fine? If it isn't recommended what does that mean? create spinners? incomplete stamps, something else?

All the molds that CPC doesn't list on their website as available for stamping cannot be stamped by CPC. You'd have to go to @AK Chip for stamping on any other mold.

-If a die is custom made, does the entire die get made or can part of it be made and part of it utilize the denom dies? For example, if someone wanted to use what is essentially the Fractional Stock Die but have a different name and location in there, is that custom? Also, if you wanted a fractional stock die equivalent made but then a stamp for 5 cents and 25 cents is that two custom dies or is that 1 custom die + 2 stock centers?

I'm not really sure about whether CPC can do this, I know it is possible from Paulson and such, but I've never inquired about it for CPC. I don't think they can though, given that their stock denom dies take up so much of the available stamping space.

-If a custom die is being made that is just text, what's the LoE for 'art work' that goes into that?

It should be pretty easy to design a hot-stamp die that's just text if you have the fonts preselected and even if you don't, it wouldn't be hard for any good designer to find some.

 

[JustDave]

All the molds that CPC doesn't list on their website as available for stamping cannot be stamped by CPC. You'd have to go to @AK Chip for stamping on any other mold.

I'm not really sure about whether CPC can do this, I know it is possible from Paulson and such, but I've never inquired about it for CPC. I don't think they can though, given that their stock denom dies take up so much of the available stamping space.

It should be pretty easy to design a hot-stamp die that's just text if you have the fonts preselected and even if you don't, it wouldn't be hard for any good designer to find some.

Just to be explicit, http://www.classicpokerchips.com/pokerchips/realclay/molddesigns.htm
doesn't have DIASQR or Hourglass as "Recommended for 7/8" inlays and hot-stamping."

So neither of those molds can be hot-stamped by CPC?

 

[GianThaMan]

Just to be explicit, http://www.classicpokerchips.com/pokerchips/realclay/molddesigns.htm
doesn't have DIASQR or Hourglass as "Recommended for 7/8" inlays and hot-stamping."

So neither of those molds can be hot-stamped by CPC?

No, neither of those molds can be stamped by CPC. This part of the site is more clear on whether a mold can be stamped: http://www.classicpokerchips.com/pokerchips/realclay/hotstamps.htm
Edit: The section at the very top of the page.
Edit 2: I believe the fractional stock dies can be used with custom text wrapping around the denom, I missed that part of the page.

 

[JustDave]

No, neither of those molds can be stamped by CPC. This part of the site is more clear on whether a mold can be stamped: http://www.classicpokerchips.com/pokerchips/realclay/hotstamps.htm
Edit: The section at the very top of the page.
Edit 2: I believe the fractional stock dies can be used with custom text wrapping around the denom, I missed that part of the page.

Thanks, all good information!

 

[Eloe2000]

Sorry if this is the wrong place. But what level is 4TA181418 that I love so much in the design tool that I don't see on the mold list? Is this spot still offered if it is not on the mold list?

 

[Nex]

It's right there in the design tool, in braces, after the spot name.
L9 = Level 9

 

[Eloe2000]

It's right there in the design tool, in braces, after the spot name.
L9 = Level 9

Thanks! I am an idiot. I had the info view turned off because it was distracting. Didn't realize the levels were right there.

 

[cpac54]

Thanks! I am an idiot. I had the info view turned off because it was distracting. Didn't realize the levels were right there.

Love the spots on that chip!

 

[Eloe2000]

Love the spots on that chip!

It's a red herring. The actual spot colors I am going to use is even better

 

[superchromix]

It's a red herring. The actual spot colors I am going to use is even better

Hey, are you using photos of the colour sample chips to create realistic simulated base colour / spot combos?

 

[Eloe2000]

Hey, are you using photos of the colour sample chips to create realistic simulated base colour / spot combos?

Yup. So what you see above would be similar to the real deal. I have taken a photo of the individual sample chips and balanced the temperature and tones correctly and then stacked them all. I am a photographer so I really prefer seeing photographs as opposed to renderings. The colors I am having a hard time deciding on are oranges, purples, and pinks and I find the color accuracy of the online tool not great enough for me to make my determinations. Also being skilled with Photoshop and masking helps here.

 

[davislane]

Yup. So what you see above would be similar to the real deal. I have taken a photo of all of the chips and balanced the temperature and tones correctly and then stacked them all. I am a photographer so I really prefer seeing photographs as opposed to renderings. The colors I am having a hard time deciding on are oranges, purples, and pinks and I find the color accuracy of the online tool not great enough for me to make my determinations. Also being skilled with Photoshop and masking helps here.

Are you services availble for hire?

 

[Poker Zombie]

Yup. So what you see above would be similar to the real deal. I have taken a photo of all of the chips and balanced the temperature and tones correctly and then stacked them all. I am a photographer so I really prefer seeing photographs as opposed to renderings. The colors I am having a hard time deciding on are oranges, purples, and pinks and I find the color accuracy of the online tool not great enough for me to make my determinations. Also being skilled with Photoshop and masking helps here.

I had done the same thing when I was trying to develop a new spot pattern. Went through a bunch before one got approved, but safe to say it was as good as I had hoped for.

 

[GianThaMan]

Yup. So what you see above would be similar to the real deal. I have taken a photo of the individual sample chips and balanced the temperature and tones correctly and then stacked them all. I am a photographer so I really prefer seeing photographs as opposed to renderings. The colors I am having a hard time deciding on are oranges, purples, and pinks and I find the color accuracy of the online tool not great enough for me to make my determinations. Also being skilled with Photoshop and masking helps here.

It would be awesome if you could post all of those photos as a resource here, it could help people see something closer to the actual colors, and would be useful if anybody else wanted to use photoshop to mask edge spots onto them.

 

[Nex]

Posting photos of sample chips won't help much. Cue screen color calibration, cue ambient light influence on perceived colors.
There is nothing digital that can replace a physical color sample set.

If it's just to mock up imaginary new spot patterns you can simply take screenshots of plain color chips in the design tool and stack&mask these.

 

[JeepologyOffroad]

There is nothing digital that can replace a physical color sample set.

True, but imo doing this still gives a MUCH better idea of what a chip will look like compared to the design tool

 

[Eloe2000]

And what really helps is seeing different colors shot under the same conditions for understanding how they will look together. So while a Retro Red on Peacock Blue chip may look different in one photo to another under different lighting conditions or different on different screens, what helps here is seeing those colors together at the same time under the same conditions.

And FWIW my monitors are calibrated and when I do something like this i check across two different separately calibrated monitors as well as an iPhone or and iPad which is probably the most common screen out there.

 

[Nex]

I'm still not convinced how taking photographs of color samples as base material over screenshots from the design tool for compositing purposes alone would help that much. Sure, it might "normalize" the perceived differences between colors, but you still have no clue where the colors are in absolute terms if you only have the photos and nothing else.

This would probably only help someone who already has physical color samples get a better idea how colors look together in some kind of spot pattern, but only as the very last step of visualization. That person would still need to grab the physical samples to get an idea of how each color individually looks under different lighting. It would only be for the color interaction and nothing else.

Anyway, for those people, you may want to check the camera(s) you have at your disposal. You can do these photos yourself if the cameras support the following:
- they have a full manual mode (where you can set aperture, shutter speed and ISO all yourself)
- they allow you to set a fixed white balance manually (instead of auto white balance) or/and allow you to save raw data (instead of JPEG)
- and you ideally have a tripod. it works without too, just the results are harder to work with
You want to set a fixed color temperature / "white balance"and pick the fluorescent or incandescent preset, depending on the kind of artificial light you have available (desk lamp, neon tube, whatever). You set up some place where you get as little daylight as possible and can set up your artificial light and a tripod. Then you go into semi-automatic mode A/Av, set a somewhat open but perhaps not wide open aperture (4 might be a good near-universal value for this), slap the camera on the tripod, focus, and take a look at what settings the automatic suggests for aperture/shutter/iso. You note them down, go into M/full manual mode and put those values in. Then start taking photos of all the color samples. This ensures all photos are made using the same "baseline" in terms of exposure and white balance, and hence can be "compared" side by side on the same screen without any skew. You use artificial light instead of daylight for this because daylight doesn't always stay the same, it can change within minutes, so it would screw up the uniformity we've been going for.

 

[Poker Zombie]

When I did it, I was able to compare the colors on my monitor to the physical color sample in my poker room (which is fortunately where the monitor is located). As such, my colors were spot-on, but I agree that posting the pics won't help others, unless they are using my monitor in my room - and even then, it would be questionable as the monitor is 6 years older now.

 

[Gear]

posting the pics won't help others, unless they are using my monitor in my room

this, this, this, exactly this.

This is also why asking for "the" CMYK values (or worse, RGB values) to match chips is pointless.

 

[superchromix]

Personally, knowing how difficult it is to take a set of these photos under uniform lighting conditions, I think it would be great if @Eloe2000 could make his stack of images available. These, together with the photoshop masks for creating edge spots from the photos, could be a great resource for prospective CPC set designers. No, it does not replace a colour sample set, but that was never the point - it provides something totally different.

 

[madforpancakes]

Yup. So what you see above would be similar to the real deal. I have taken a photo of the individual sample chips and balanced the temperature and tones correctly and then stacked them all. I am a photographer so I really prefer seeing photographs as opposed to renderings. The colors I am having a hard time deciding on are oranges, purples, and pinks and I find the color accuracy of the online tool not great enough for me to make my determinations. Also being skilled with Photoshop and masking helps here.

I did something very similar to mock up some of my chips that I was a little unsure of, I found it definitely helps get a better idea of what a chip might actually look like made.

 

[GianThaMan]

I wasn’t saying the pictures could be a replacement for a physical color sample set, but they would be much closer than the colors in the CPC design tool. Also, I’d just really like to use some high-quality CPC sample images to make mockups with masks. The design tool tends to dull out or otherwise misrepresent the colors, and even the website color sample images are pretty inaccurate.

 

[Eloe2000]

Are you services availble for hire?

At the moment I am overcommitted on projects including a soonish deadline for this CSQ. Possibly in the future this is something I could do. I assume it’s more than just one chip you are having an issue with but more in general across the set you are designing corect?

Personally, knowing how difficult it is to take a set of these photos under uniform lighting conditions, I think it would be great if @Eloe2000 could make his stack of images available. These, together with the photoshop masks for creating edge spots from the photos, could be a great resource for prospective CPC set designers. No, it does not replace a colour sample set, but that was never the point - it provides something totally different.

There were some colors I didn’t photograph but I will go ahead and photograph those as well. I will color correct everything and make those available. But I only made masks for like the 8 spot patterns I was concerned with for my set... and there are how many in total? 100? More? That is much more time consuming. Additionally I would have no idea how to automate masking etc. in some kind online utility. Essentially it’s the same thing that J5 and David did with the online tool just using photographs. And for what it’s worth the online tool colors are really accurate.

 

[Poker Zombie]

In the end, you will wind up with something little better than the chip design tool. The colors may be off in the tool but they are uniformly off, the same way that manual masks of chip photos are.

Best bet is to buy a sample set of colors. A full sample set is $54. Not cheap, but you can recoup nearly 100% of that by selling them here, so in reality it would cost... $4-$10, including shipping?

$10, on a set of chips that is going to cost between $600 and several thousand dollars? Talk about being pot committed.

 

[Rieguy]

In the end, you will wind up with something little better than the chip design tool. The colors may be off in the tool but they are uniformly off, the same way that manual masks of chip photos are.

Best bet is to buy a sample set of colors. A full sample set is $54. Not cheap, but you can recoup nearly 100% of that by selling them here, so in reality it would cost... $4-$10, including shipping?

$10, on a set of chips that is going to cost between $600 and several thousand dollars? Talk about being pot committed.

What I resorted to doing was building what looked best in the design tool, and then altering to the correct colors after laying out all of the chips and different combinations, which changed almost every chip in some way (DG Saturn ). It is honestly pretty funny contrasting what looks the best online to the final mock-up of what you will actually be using.

I am all for someone being able to create usable template that more accurately reflects the colors, but like almost everyone here is saying, people still need to ultimately have the chips in person to avoid any potential issues/disappointment. The information the CPC design tool provides is great too.

 

[Eloe2000]

In the end, you will wind up with something little better than the chip design tool. The colors may be off in the tool but they are uniformly off, the same way that manual masks of chip photos are.

Best bet is to buy a sample set of colors. A full sample set is $54. Not cheap, but you can recoup nearly 100% of that by selling them here, so in reality it would cost... $4-$10, including shipping?

$10, on a set of chips that is going to cost between $600 and several thousand dollars? Talk about being pot committed.

Owning a sample set is an absolute necessity. No if’s or buts about it. However there is a lot of value in doing these real world photo mock-ups. The reason why I did this masking mock-up thing is two fold;

1) even with the sample chips in my hands and stacking them it is still hard to visual each color in a spot. This is very relevant because with different spot placements or sizes it is difficult to conceptualize balance between colors particular when together on the same chip with different spot locations and sizes. Some colors may be more muted but will be more powerful because of spot size or positioning relative to other colors for example, and

2) while I agree the colors on the tool are surprisingly accurate I was having difficulty in the orange, yellow, red space as I am literally layering multiple oranges and yellows on the same chip and there is enough deviation on the tool that I wasn’t able to visualize it effectively.

All of that being said, I agree that posting the individual chip photos won’t do too much for people but it will be more accurate that the photos on the CPC colors page.

 

[Poker Zombie]

What I resorted to doing was building what looked best in the design tool, and then altering to the correct colors after laying out all of the chips and different combinations, which changed almost every chip in some way (DG Saturn ). It is honestly pretty funny contrasting what looks the best online to the final mock-up of what you will actually be using.

I am all for someone being able to create usable template that more accurately reflects the colors, but like almost everyone here is saying, people still need to ultimately have the chips in person to avoid any potential issues/disappointment. The information the CPC design tool provides is great too.

It's also important to remember that chip colors are not etched in stone. The colors are mixed, by hand. Today's DG Saturn may be more green or more yellow than yesterdays. Tomorrows Mandarin Red may be a little more bold or muted than the batch they make next year. Suppliers change, mixes change. There are many stories about people that added on where the new chips dont exactly match, even though they are the same colors.

In the end, these are chips. Custom, unique, chips. You aren't getting parts for the next Mars mission. Lower your expectations a little. I have yet to meet someone who got a CPC set that was disappointed. Get samples, but don't be surprised if a few colors are a shade off. It's as much art as it is science.

 

[Nex]

In the end, you will wind up with something little better than the chip design tool. The colors may be off in the tool but they are uniformly off, the same way that manual masks of chip photos are.

I have to disagree on that part. The colors in the chip tool are not uniformly off. So using real world photos of color samples will definitely improve this aspect. But like I previously said, it is very little help in absolute terms, and you still need physical samples.

 

[Eloe2000]

I think we all agree that an actual color sample set is 100% necessary.

The online tool as well as photo masking are just chip and set design visualization tools. But these certainly can have value.