What it does
The Pre-Grader estimates a card’s centering from a photo and tells you the best PSA grade that centering alone would allow. It also tries to identify which card you’re holding so it can pull up prices. Everything runs on your device — no upload, no account needed.
- 1CaptureUse the live camera or upload a photo. Fill the frame with the card, straight-on, on a plain contrasting background in even light.
- 2Auto-detectIt finds the card’s outline and the inner artwork border automatically. You can nudge the box handles if the edges are off.
- 3StraightenA perspective warp squares the card up so the measurements aren’t thrown off by camera angle.
- 4MeasureIt reads the four border widths, computes the left/right and top/bottom ratios, and maps the worse axis to a PSA tolerance to give a grade ceiling.
- 5IdentifyA perceptual hash of the artwork plus OCR of the name and collector number are matched against the catalog to name the card and show its market price.
The Pre-Grader only judges centering. Corners, edges and surface still decide the final grade — see “How does card grading work?” for the full picture.
Best results: matte background, no shadow across the card, camera parallel to the card, and a photo at least ~1000px wide.
Why the number is a ‘ceiling’, not a grade
If a card’s centering is only good enough for a PSA 8, no amount of perfect corners will lift it past 8. So the ceiling is the most you could hope for. A card can always grade lower than the ceiling because of the other three factors.