Re: Best way to image a coin?

On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 22:35:12 GMT, Bruce Farley
<afakeaddress1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Those are great pictures. What do you use for lighting and holding the
>camera?

Thanks, Bruce.

Lighting: the more pictures I take, the more I am getting into using
natural sunlight. We have one window in our kitchen where the
afternoon sun hits it from a certain angle. On a nice day, with our
cream-colored drapes drawn, I get just enough diffused sunlight to
illuminate the coins without any harshness. If it's cloudy, I leave
the drapes open. You have to experiment, of course. At least with
digital cameras, it doesn't cost you anything to take 2 or 3 dozen
shots until you find the right settings! I have also tried halogen
lamps, but I find that they only work for certain kinds of coins, and
it's much less of a hassle to set up both the camera AND the lamp than
it is to just set up next to the window.

Holding: I use a tripod, which we had anyway for our Sony video
camera, and the adaptor attachment fits the Nikon as well. I use the
camera's macro setting and place the camera as close as I can get and
still use the auto-focus feature. This is about four inches or so.
Then I shoot the pictures using the camera's self-timer to ensure that
the camera is steady.

It's also very important to set the white balance properly. For this,
I use the back side of a Kodak 18% gray card. It does make a
difference in the way the colors come out, although I'll be damned if
I can tell the difference between the white of the card and a plain
*** of white paper with the naked eye...I know, the gray cards are
expensive, but it's really a one-time purchase until you get it dirty,
if ever.

Once you have this set up, you need to think about the background you
want to use for your coins. It also has an effect on the way the
camera reproduces the coin's color. I usually use light-blue colored
paper for silver coins, but green or black is also nice. I use green
paper for most slabs, for example. Copper coins seem to come out best
with a pink background. That's a tip I got from this website:

http://www.uscents.com/articles/DCP/DCP002.htm

Here's another link you might want to read:

http://www.coinworld.com/news/011705/BW_0117.asp

Also, be sure to set up the imaging mode for the finest possible
quality and highest resolution. You can always size a picture down,
but if you start with a smaller picture, you might get stuck. Because
when you enlarge a picture, you're just making the pixels larger, not
adding any detail. BTW, you will need some kind of paint program to
crop the pictures and perhaps rotate them after you have put them into
the computer. I use an old version of Paint Shop Pro which used to be
shareware, but is now a retail product. Adobe PhotoShop is the "big
brother" of that program but is expensive. If all you need to do is
resize, rotate and crop, and perhaps save in different formats, you
can probably find free software to do that. Since I know and like
Paint Shop Pro, I can recommend it.

As to paint sotware: yes, there are lots of "tricks" one can use, but
if I find that the colors aren't right, or the focus not quite sharp,
I always get better results by going back to the camera and starting
over. I feel strongly that it is also not ethical to adjust things
unless you just can't get the picture to look like the coin otherwise.
Look at Ira Stein's auctions on eBay ("iras4"). He says he takes all
his own pictures and admits to using Photoshop just so they match the
coin. I've seldom seen more beautiful pictures on eBay, but then again
he has beautiful coins to showcase.

I used to (still do) have a Panasonic Lumix which has great features,
but I always had trouble with the color for some reason, so I would
have to do some gamma correction in the computer. But it never looked
as good as the pictures from my Nikon, which I actually only bought
because the Lumix is heavy and my wife complained about the weight
when we went on vacation trips! Of course, I looked around for
recommendations for a camera which was also good at coin shots, and
lots of people had recommended the Nikon Coolpix.

One last thing which is more of an aesthetic issue: Since I work with
a fixed lighting and camera setup, I find that I often turn the coin
at funny angles so that the angle of light is best for the coin's
design. For example, the Swiss 20 Franc gold "Vreneli" coins have this
innocent-looking milk maid (??) looking left and upwards with
mountains in the background. If I have the light coming from W-NW, it
looks like she is gazing into a sunrise in the Swiss mountains. But I
have to turn the coin and rotate the image -- which is another reaso
why you'd want an imaging program that can do more than 90 degree
increments. Here's the results of the Swiss coin:

http://imagecloset.com/3/1059-Switzerland_Vreneli_20_Fr_1909_obv.jpg
http://imagecloset.com/3/1000-Switzerland_Vreneli_20_Fr_1909_rev.jpg

Hope this will help you get started!

--
Bob Hairgrove
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