Animation and Coin Photography

Animation and Coin Photography

I have received some questions about the animated images I have been posting.



An animated photo uses the same approach as a cartoon or flip book. Take two similar still images and just flip between them. It takes a lot of words to describe, but creating one is easy.

I have some more examples, such as

· this Lincoln cent,

· a Buffalo nickel,

· a Standing Liberty quarter, and

· a Morgan dollar

I make these animations for several reasons.

• Luster is very difficult to portray in a static image. Most coin photos have to be underexposed to keep the highlights from being too bright. This also suppresses the luster – it becomes a gray area on silver coins. One image cannot show that the luster moves around. With just a couple of images you can show the light at two different angles. Alternating between two images can simulate tilting the coin in your hand, giving the viewer a much better feel for the coin.
  
  
• More subtly, a slightly animated image, even just two frames, works with the brain to fill in the gaps that you can't see in a still. You get the information about two positions. The brain turns it into something much more – a 3-D map of the surface.

• Two or three images can reveal surface conditions that one light angle may not. Often a single image is chosen to portray the coin based on its attractiveness. With two or more you can still have that glamorous portrayal. Taken as a whole, the entire set of photos will be more clinical in showing the entire coin from different angles to the camera and to the lights. (If you follow the link to the Morgan above, you can see that one angle hides the chatter in the fields, while the other reveals it. Don't forget to click or tap on the image to expand it.)
  
  
• If you shoot photos through slabs, any marks on the slab will show in two different positions on each photo. When animated, they seem to float above the coin and are clearly from the slab, not from the coin.

Ideally, I would like to make the static image obsolete. Animations are easy to make, and the animations are internet-friendly. Their detail would be a boon to internet buyers; the ability to show luster would be great for sellers. Any artifact that is hidden at one angle will be visible from another, so simple animations could end suspicion about “juiced”, suspiciously lit, or intentionally misleading photos.

Many effects can be achieved with animations. Some of them can be seen on this site. Of course, the more spectacular the effect, such as rotating the lighting all the way around a coin, the more photos need to be taken and more labor expended.

My goal is limited to revealing the luster that a static photo does not.

My process is pretty simple - incredibly so. Anyone can do it.

I got to the point where I found lighting that works and a camera setup that takes adequate images for the web. I take two shots of the obverse and two of the reverse. I rest the coin on a black foam insert to reduce reflections from its surroundings. The first photo is taken with the insert tilted up on one side on a piece of cardboard to get a good lighting angle. Then I slide a second piece of cardboard under that edge to increase the angle and take the second picture. I do the same for the back.

Here is the setup for the first angle. For the second photo I slide in the second piece of cardboard. You could also change the angle from side to side to capture the luster. My setup has the lights at the 10:00 and 2:00 positions adjacent to the camera lens, so tipping it further up at the bottom will tip it more toward the light. I can choose to fully illuminate the fields or just move the coin around to get some diffused light around the devices. Any difference, really, between the two photos will make a good animation.



For the four photos I erase the background down to black, and crop each image to 800x800. You want the two obverses to be the same size and close to the same orientation, and the same for the reverses, too. I join the first front and back photos side-by-side, then the second front and back photos, to make two images like these.

First joined obverse and reverse


And the second obverse and reverse joined side-by-side.


These I save as .JPEG files and .GIF files. (The .GIF files are needed because I use the world's oldest and worst piece of software, Microsoft GIF Animator, from 1996. It's only able to join together GIF files.)

Many applications are available to join image files together to make an animated GIF. If you don’t have one, you can search the Web for free applications. In the application of your choice, you specify the two (or more) image files to be used in the animation. The animation is set to repeat, and to “loop indefinitely”. You should also modify the settings of each frame (each input image becomes one frame of the animation) to show for 1.0 seconds.

Here the obverse and reverse have a little bit of rotation between the two images. This accentuates the illusion of movement. The top image in this article, of the 1950 Lincoln Proof, has better alignment so the coin appears more motionless - as though only the light is changing. Both are satisfying to me.



I hope you try it. You can see more examples over in the Post Your Lincolns thread.

 

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Heres a Few i Made ( not us coins though), I put my phone on top of some cans of food + tipped the coin a little bit with each picture + edited them with https://ezgif.com/maker

 

These were done by @messydesk

 

Here's a couple I've made.

 

Hot dang! Did he animate in the thunderbolts shooting? That looks kinda weird, but kinda cool.

And, I like the Morgan animations - a smooth transition, with multiple images. I think for this animation thing to really work, there has to be more than just two frames. The point is to show how the luster moves, and that's not possible with only two images.

How many images did you use to get such a smooth animation? Or, did you use a different technique than the OP?

 

One note about GIF files, they are limited to 256 colors.

 

All valid points however almost all scratches and scuffs you are seeing on this particular coin are on the plastic. The coin is an MS-67. I should have had it reholdered first. They're very light, almost imperceptible in hand, but the angles do bring them out.

And as an aside, I bought the coin in-hand from a friend last summer at Anaheim

 

Nice post, Ron. I think animation is great, especially for a coin that one is considering buying. However, an option to freeze it and step through frame by frame is critical. It's very difficult to study detail on an image that changes every second or more quickly.

Motion gifs are typically viewed with software designed for still images. Some very common pic programs, like FastStone, don't have the capability to freeze or step through a motion gif or if they do, it's not immediately obvious to users. On the other hand, an animation in mp4, flv, avi, mkv, etc. format is typically viewed in a motion picture program, like VLC, which has a pause button in the lower left corner of the screen.

And yes, it is possible with many pic viewing programs to burst a motion gif back to individual pics, but it's often not obvious how to do it. For example, in FastStone, you use the image conversion feature with both input and output file(s) being gifs. There is no notice that if the input file is a motion gif, the output will be a series of still frames, but that's what happens. BTW, FastStone provides an elegant and easy way to create motion gifs (click Create at top of program screen, then Multipage File Builder, add pics, select animated gif as output, click Create ... in the pop-up screen, not at top of program screen!).

Probably the neatest way to do animation if you have just a few pics is to use a movie creation program and have the pics fade or morph into each other in succession.

Cal

 

The obverse of the Lincoln Cent was 115 images and the reverse was 131. I was going by the typical stop motion animation and cinema frame rate of 24 frames per second to achieve a smooth animation. I was aiming for around 120 frames for each side to give a duration of 5 seconds to show the light traveling around the coin. The coin was turned 360 degrees by hand incrementally and a frame was shot at each move. My final numbers were not quite as precise as I hoped, but I think it turned out to be just fine.

I used Photoshop to auto align each frame so that the light appeared to move rather than the coin. Otherwise, it would have looked like the coin was rolling.

 

The thunderbolts are holograms in the metal of the coin. Lighting these things is tricky, and it took some experimenting to get the light path I wanted that showed the medal reasonably well and made the thunderbolts pop and change color and "position". I used a total of 15 images for this to make the thunderbolts smoother. The GIF file has 29 frames, because I play it forward and backward.

6 images (11 frames in the GIF) for the Morgan.

One additional thing about the animated images is that you don't need a really large image to convey a lot of info about the coin, which is good, since the file size would be nasty otherwise. When I look at a coin in hand, it's first without magnification, and I wobble it in the light to see how the luster looks. You also can see surface imperfections like scratches, hits, or cleaning hairlines pop when you do this. Still no magnification. Doug touched on this when mentioning that the right lighting angle can hide or reveal problems. If you use all lighting angles, you get to see everything. I'd guess that most people would feel more comfortable about an image-based buying decision with a 600x600 animation of the 82-S Morgan than with a 1500x1500 static image.

 

I've attached a gif file that uses the same two images contained in Ron's motion gif, but with a gradual dissolve. This was done by bursting the original motion gif to its two pics. The dropping the two gifs into MovieMaker and using a fade-in to the first pic and a dissolve to the second. Then it was saved as an mp4 file. Unfortunately cointalk does not support mp4, so it was converted back to a multi-frame gif at ezgif.com. This causes some loss of quality compared to the mp4.

Cal

 

Holy crap! Now that is an ambitious project!

Some weekend when I have absolutely nothing else to do, I might try this. I'd love to see what it did for a couple of my prooflike coins.

 

It is amazing that cameras have been pushed to millions of pixels of resolution each with millions of possible colors, and yet a 256-color image of a thousand or so pixels across seems to be pretty adequate. In the particular case of an image of a coin, the subject is largely the same color, so most of those 256 can be used to represent "shades of copper" or whatever it might be. That helps a lot.

 

It sounds a little more daunting than it really is. It takes about an hour or so from the start of the shoot to the finished project for both obverse and reverse. My camera and lights remain in a fixed position, while I use a small black velvet jewelers tray with a black rubber stopper to mount the coin and rotate it for each frame.

Once all the images are shot, I use Photoshop to open all the images into one file using layers, it's an automated process. Then Photoshop has an Auto Align Layers option, which brings all the coin images into perfect alignment. Then it's a simple crop, and edit to make sure the background is completely black. Then I decide how long each frame is visible and then save the file...

 

Excellent! And don't be so humble; this was quite the ambitious task no matter how one looks at it. Kudos.

 

This is a little different from the way I do it. I leave the camera and coin in place and move the lights. One hand has a light and a remote trigger for the camera in it, the other hand has the other light. It's harder to keep the light intensity (i.e., distance from coin) consistent, but the images are already aligned unless I bump something. Not sure I'd want to do this for 100 images, though.

With the images already aligned, I open them in Camera Raw, fine-tune any exposure issues, square crop them all at once, save with sequential serial numbers and use an Imagemagick script running under a bash shell to do the circle cropping, reduce to the correct size, apply a sharpening filter, and generate the animation. I never actually use the main part of Photoshop.

 

It looks like Imagemagick supports generating WebP animations, so I'll have to try modifying my script to generate those as well and see how it works. I had looked into APNG a while back, but there wasn't enough browser support for it for me to pursue it. Telling someone, "Here's an animated image. If you have this browser, download this plugin in order to view it. If you have that browser, download this version of Java so that you can be compatible with the version of the installer for the plugin that works with your browser version..." is a bit more off-putting than, "Here's an animated image. Enjoy!"