How to photograph a card for a good measurement

Read this once and you will get a usable report. Ignore it and you will still get a report — it will just tell you which measurements the photo could not support.

We never reject a card for being photographed imperfectly. There is no quality bar to clear and no upload will be turned away for looking wrong. If a photo cannot support a measurement, the report says exactly that, withholds the number, and tells you what to re-shoot. Sending a soft photo of a card you own beats sending nothing.

The five things that matter

1. The whole card, with a margin around it

All four edges and all four corners must be inside the frame, with a little background visible around the card. A photo cropped to the artwork is the one case we cannot work with at all: the pipeline needs the card's own edge to measure centering, and if the crop is tighter than the card there is no edge to find.

2. Flat on, not at an angle

Hold the camera directly above the card, not off to one side. Perspective does not just skew the picture — it changes the apparent border widths, which is precisely what centering is measured from. A few degrees is corrected automatically; a photo taken from a steep angle is not.

3. Light that does not reflect

Daylight from a window, or two lamps at roughly 45 degrees, works well. Avoid a direct flash or a single overhead bulb, which puts a bright patch on holo and hides surface detail underneath it. Glare is the most common reason a surface measurement comes back as "not measurable" — moving the light, not the card, is usually the fix.

4. Enough pixels

Fill the frame with the card. A modern phone held close gives around 30–40 pixels per millimetre of card, which resolves the fine print lines and the corner fraying the report talks about. Below roughly 20 px/mm the pipeline stops trusting corner and surface measurements and says so; below 10 px/mm centering itself becomes approximate.

5. The card on a plain, coloured surface

A matte surface in a strong mid-tone colour works best - a red, green or orange cloth or sheet of paper. It has to differ from both sides of the card: black or dark navy swallows the dark-blue border of the back, and white or light grey swallows the silver border every card since Scarlet & Violet has. A patterned tablecloth or a reflective surface can confuse edge detection, and a transparent sleeve or top-loader adds a second edge that has to be told apart from the card's own.

For a tight grade range: the full set (about 14 photos)

The two photos above give you a ceiling: the best grade the card can get. How far below that ceiling it may land depends on how much of the card the photos actually let us check. Every report lists each dimension as measured, partly, rough or not verified, and widens the grade range for each one that was not checked. These shots are what closes the gaps:

Front and back, flat, the whole card - as above. The back's blue border shows corner and edge wear better than any front.
Two or three more photos of the front, each with the light from a different side (left, right, top). The card and the phone stay put; only the lamp moves. A reflection moves with the lamp, a scratch does not - this is how the report tells them apart, and on textured full-art and holo cards it is the only way most of the surface gets checked at all.
A close-up of each corner, front and back (8 photos). The corner plus about 1 cm of both edges and a sliver of the background, in focus. Use the phone's 2x or 3x lens, or hold it about 5 cm away. A corner photographed this way is measured on the close-up instead of on the whole-card photo, at two to three times the detail.

What you get back. A range per company - for example ACE 7-8 - with a confidence level, the list of what was and was not checked, and which of the shots above would narrow it. The range is learnt from cards whose raw photos were graded afterwards; while there are few of those, the report says the range is provisional.

Be honest with yourself about the surface. Scratches in the gloss of a textured full-art are the hardest thing to see in a photograph, and the most common reason a card that looks perfect comes back a grade or two lower. When the photos could not show enough of the surface, the report says so and does not let the card reach a 10 on that evidence.

The two sides

Front — required. This is what carries the centering and the artwork comparison.
Back — optional but valuable. The back carries its own centering limits, and graders apply them separately. Without a back photo the report covers the front only and tells you it did.

What to do if you have no better photo

Upload it anyway. The report is built to be honest about its own inputs: it reports the source resolution, how far the detected card edges sit from the card's cut, whether the whole card was in frame, and whether the photo was sharp enough to resolve surface defects. When something is not measurable it prints a dash rather than a number, and when centering cannot be trusted it withholds a grade instead of publishing a placeholder.

A card graded from a mediocre photo still tells you the centering, the card's identity, and whether its surface texture matches the genuine printing — often enough to decide whether the card is worth submitting at all.

Scanning instead (the most precise option)

A flatbed scanner gives what no phone photo can: a known resolution and no perspective at all. The report then reads the card's size in millimetres (a genuine card is 63 × 88 mm), its corners and edges at a few hundredths of a millimetre, and the printing screen itself.

1200 DPI, colour, saved as PNG or TIFF (not JPEG). Keep the scanner's own DPI in the file - do not resize or export through an editor that drops it. 600 DPI works, 1200 is what the report is tuned for.
Crop to the card with a margin of about a centimetre, so the file stays under 40 MB. A whole-page scan is mostly empty glass.
A dark lid or a sheet of black paper behind the card. A white lid works, but a dark one makes the cut stand out on every border.
Twice per side: scan, turn the card 180° on the glass, scan again. A scanner lights from one side only; the second scan shows the scratches and dents the first one's light ran along.
Raw cards only. A slab is too thick for the scanner's focus.

The report measures how sharp each scan really is from the card's own cut edges: a scanner sold as 1200 DPI often resolves like 600. To know your scanner once and for all, print the calibration card (PDF) at 100 % and scan it with your first cards - twice, the second time with the paper turned 90° on the glass. It gives the scanner's sharpness in both directions and its scale, so cards from it are measured to its own numbers. Retouching a scan only fools this report, never the grader the card goes to.

Accepted files

.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .webp, .heic, .heif, .tif, .tiff — up to 40 MB each. Phone HEIC files are fine, they are converted on arrival.

I have my photos ready