Ancient Coin Purchased by Mistake

I haven't purchased any ancient coins for several months...

...until last Saturday when I went on a Seleucid Kings binge and ordered what I thought were 9 Antiochos bronze coins. Anyway, the one that I ordered by mistake belongs more appropriately in my small Seleucis and Pieria collection. See below—it's the one under the provenance notes.
I've decided to keep it.

 

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I can think of far worse mistakes to make. If you ask me, that's a darn good mistake!

 

@Deacon Ray Really cool graphics - do you make those yourself? The ragged edge on the mosaic, shading behind the coins... there's a good designer behind all this.

 

Thank you for your kind words @Archilochus ! I've had quite a bit of graphics experience doing all of the printed material for my church. I use Adobe InDesign and PhotoShop.

 

Aha! I knew it. Quick question - do you know any clever way to make the background of a coin photo transparent? Right now I use the tool in Mac Preview, which works great but takes a lot of time per coin. I'm hoping to find some web-based tool that can figure it out automatically.

 

If you don't mind me asking, Deacon, are those coins replicas ? Even if they are, they would still be of interest. My collection includes a number of replicas, such as one of Brutus - non-experts wouldn't be able to tell the difference !

 

Hi Bert, no problem. They're real. They all came from trusted VCoins dealers with lifetime money back guarantees of authenticity. The top one of Zeus/Ram is from Karl-Ludwig Grabow, Berlin

 

That's marvellous, Deacon. I was about to lose a good night's sleep !!!

 

Very nice, DR.

 

Thanks for posting this really cool graphic! Nice coins, too.

 

@Archilochus —I don't know of any method aside from tracing around the coin either using the Pen Tool or Auto Trace Tool in PhotoShop. Cutting or copying the coin image and pasting into a transparent window or transparent layer. (It can get a bit complicated. It took me quite a while to get a handle on it.) I'm sorry that's the only way that I know how to do it. I'm afraid I'm a Macintosh user and don't know the first thing about other types of computers.

 

I also confess that I'm an art school graduate—but that was long ago in the last century.

 

I'm glad you're with us, Bert! Questions like that keep us on our toes.

 

Nice mistake @Deacon Ray - turned out well for you!

 

Thanks, Deacon, but I may have to borrow your surrender flag, sometime. But it would be in pristine condition when I return it !

 

The Surrender Flag is to show that I have stopped trying to fight my compulsion to collect ancient coins.

 

I use the Magnetic Lasso Tool if I needed to remove a background, then us the Polygon Lasso Tool to clean up any inaccurate selections. Another way, if the background is consistent in color and there was enough contrast with the coin edge itself, would be to use the Magic Wand Tool (with Contiguous checked). Or if you photograph on a special color not included in the coin (often green, like they do with chroma keying weather people), you can use the Select > Color Range... color pick your color you want to select (ie the green background) and adjust the Fuzziness setting to make the background white and the coin black, hit OK and you now should have the bkgd selected to Cut (or invert your selection, Cmd+Shift+I, and copy your coin to another document). Though by photographing with a bright color like green, you might need to color correct your coin to remove any color reflection (called "spill") on the coin.

 

I just searched about and tried out the Background Eraser Tool to mediocre success. It could at least easily get you started, then use a bigger brush to straight-up erase the rest of the bkgd.



More details about it here:
https://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/background-eraser/

 

Yes, that's a great way also. You've got it—that's an excellent job, Justin!

 

Thanks! Takes an art school grad to know an art school grad (or graphic design school grad at least).

BTW, @Deacon Ray where do you find your historical images that you pair with your paper-look? Like that beautiful mosaic!