I spent about an hour and a half on this coin trying to photograph it to my liking. I'm still not happy. Too bright on the left side, not enough color, and the backgrounds don't match. Very frustrating. Of course I was interrupted with having to shoot various battle scenes...and to satisfy my thirst. This chunky coin deserves a better photo but I'm all used up tonight. Any suggestions? (Battle scenes below...the little guy is some kind of wizard. He fights many foes. No critiques needed on these, thank you. )
Couple of things, try over exposing it a bit and then playing with contrast and brightness, unless you have SW with more features, you can play with the highlights feature. And/or hit it with brighter light from an angle. How about this
As 4to2 showed, you can improve it quite a bit in processing. Even with increasing overall lighting and decreasing shadows, this should probably be reshot. After some tweaking in Photoshop Elements, you can see the coin but the shadows are too dark to improve without grossly overbrightening the features. What camera are you using? What settings? Are you using a directed light or just ambient lighting?
Try reshooting without directing any light straight at the coin but bounce a lot of light around the room (I use a closet for exactly this reason). The problem I see is the high relief and thick coin produced its own shadows creating contrasts that even TIF's best efforts can't handle. Obviously this method will require a lot longer exposure but that is no problem if you have a solid camera support. It also might do well with a ringlight which can be helpful for certain circumstances but will ruin others. My example is with most light reflected off the back wall of the closet so it still has some shadows but not too much. Notice my coin is very weakly struck making it very round but not at all struck up on the legend area where yours is bold. If it were not for the irregularity taking out the Sigma, yours would be as bold legend as these get. More images are ruined by excessive contrast than by too little. It is generally possible to add contrast in postprocessing but reducing it tends to hit a wall on either highlights or shadows. If I were to reshoot my coin, I would add a white card at the lower right to give a bit of a line on that side separating it from the background but that can be overdone, too. You coin will need extra care in photography to make it look like a Hollywood star.
Neat pickup, JA ... oh, the action-scenes are great (we baby-sat the two year old Godson today, so we had lots of action at our house too ... good times) Oh, here is my example of these sweet Syracuse beauties ... ... it looks good enough to eat, eh? (kinda like an ancient candy)
Good suggestions, thanks all. @TIF I don't use a processing program...I've tried and don't really have them figured out. Thinking about the coin and the photo, I think daylight might help or perhaps the card Doug mentioned. I've never used one. I want to say the aperture was set at something like 4.7 with a 2 second shutter speed. ISO was set to auto (if that matters). @John Anthony that's 9%. Malt liquor is expensive here in England. Well, I'm going to try again tomorrow - was hoping to wake up extra early and get a couple miles in before work...good night. I'll update tomorrow. Hopefully I get home before the sun sets.
Personally I think everything is expensive here! I'm wondering which of the pictures from the folks who tweaked ahem the colours of the coins closest? Isn't that the min thing?
i purchased this coin from these two fellows at the mos eisley coin show over the weekend. they have the best deals on tantooine. why yes, i have also been drinking thank you very much.
