Photoshop your pictures to make professional looking images

I know that several of the forum members have been interested in my photographic technique. I will state very plainly that my photographic skills are not anything special and that for photography tips, I suggest buying Mark Goodman's new book.

I use a Canon Powershot SD870 IS (8.0 megapixel) camera with two OTT adjustable neck desk lamps. I don't even use a copy stand or any manual settings. However, once I get a half decent photo, I use Adobe Photoshop to make my photos look great. I will list ten easy steps below to help anyone create professional looking coin images.

Take and crop your photo
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Find a lighting set up that works for you and take a photo with adequate detail and focus, don't worry so much about brightness or color. Use the crop tool in photoshop to crop the holder of the coin. I like to have a photo of the coin in its holder as well as a photo of just the obverse and reverse.

Crop Again
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This time just crop the obverse of the coin but leave some space between the edges of the coin and the cropped area.

The Final Crop
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Now zoom in on the image so that it is rather large on the screen but still fits without scrolling. Then crop the coin by getting as close to the edges of the actual coin as possible. This may take some trial and error but with some practice, you can get quite good at it.

Re-Size your image
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What size photo you end up with will depend greatly on the camera that you use. I use an 8.0 megapixel camera so my images are usually pretty large especially for dollar coins. I like to re size my images down to 500 X 500 pixels. If your image is already smaller than this, re-size it down to the closest multiple of 50 (e.g. 418 to 400). Keep in mind that if you took the coin at a slight angle, re-sizing the coin to a square will help make the coin look more circular.

Cut your image
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In order to cut your image, you will need to find your elliptical marquee tool. This can be found by clicking and holding on the rectangular marquee tool. It should give you four options: rectangular marquee, elliptical marquee, single row marquee, and single column marquee. Select the elliptical marquee tool. On the tool bar you will find a STYLE box with three options: Normal, fixed ratio, and fixed size. Select fixed size. Now change the Width and Height boxes to the same value as your image size. In this case it will be 500px by 500px. Once you have your settings correct, you can cut my moving your cursor (cross hairs) to the top left corner of the image and clicking once. You will now see a moving dotted circular line. Move the circle so that it is in the same position as the coin and click EDIT, CUT. If you have done it correctly your screen should look like this.

Create a New File
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Go to the File menu and click new. Make sure that the size of your new file is the same (e.g. 500 px by 500 px). You should now have a white box on your screen. I like the white background for my coin photos, but I understand that others like either black or color. To change the color, click the Layer Menu, New Fill Layer, Solid Color, then pick your color. If you have selected a white background, you should see just a white box. I have added a red border so that you can see it on this page.

Paste your photo
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Go to the Edit menu and click paste. It is starting to look good and we are almost done.

Adjust your Brightness
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Now we need to adjust the brightness of the photo because we did not worry about this when taking the photo. In my photo, you will notice that it is rather dark. Go to Image, Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast. Adjust the brightness of the image only (don't touch the contrast) until you are happy with the lighting level.

Adjust your Color & Contrast
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This is our last step and you will see a dramatic difference after this little click. Go to Image, Adjustments, Auto Levels. Now take a look at your finished product.

Comparison
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You want your coin photo to look as much like the actual appearance of the coin as possible. This method is not meant to juice your photos, rather to help fix photographic ineptitude. If your photo does not look like the actual coin, I apologize, but you have to take another photo and start over. This process works very well on silver mint state coins. The performance on copper, gold, and proof coins is much less reliable and is basically hit or miss. Take a look at the coin photo before and after the image adjustments. Not bad huh!



Now that you have completed the obverse you will need to repeat this process for the reverse. Please remember that this is a method that works for me but I am not an expert by any means. Give it a try and see if it works for you. Let me know what you think.

 

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Excellent post Lehigh! I must ask though, do you take great care when you adjust the brightness and the contrast to make the photo more accurately display how the coin looks in hand? What is the best way not to "over doctor" the photo? I would imagine that this takes a lot of care. I have seen many coin images online that were edited to make the coin appear "better" than it actually is...so I'd think that it would take quite a bit of practice to doctor the photo to make it look more accurate without over doing it.

 

Awesome thread.... who needs a book when you have Lehigh! :thumb::thumb::thumb:

 

Richie,

The only subjective adjustment is the brightness. This will be based on how bad/good your original photo is. The color/contrast adjustment is done by hitting auto levels. It is not a manual adjustment, rather the photoshop software adjusts the levels to what it thinks the photo should look like. I am sure it some sort of algorithm involved. The juiced photos that you see online (Flea-Bay) are manual adjustments to color and contrast. I attempted to use this feature a few times and could never even come close to the actual appearance of the coin. Hope this helps everyone, I know it helped me.

 

Often, but not always, you can skip a lot of those steps going from "resize" to the final product merely by using "adjust brightness/contrast" and "levels" (I use control + L). If the background is white (2 x 2 , NGC slab, etc.) select the white dropper and set the backgroud to white. Sometimes you may have to try several areas to get the best coloring, but usually you can find a place that looks right.

Here is your image from the "resize" step and I merely set the background to white. In this case, I think your final is better, but they are similar. In many instances I have seen this method produce better images than going through you steps

 

I had tried that method for a while, but it doesn't always make the background completely white, which I like a lot. There is a little color still left in the background. I like my images to show the coin only with no distractions. But you are right, the color/contrast adjustment is very very close. Thanks!

 

You are correct about the background - usually. I have done it on a lot of coins and at least half of them, I like the colors better using this than what I can do separately. It is not uncommon for my camera to tone the pic red, or blue. Using this automatically corrects for this for the entire pic. (I am not an expert on photography, but it sometimes happens to me and I have seen many eBay pics like that.)

Just as a for-instance, here is one from an NGC slab.

 

Oh, OK. I didn't see that you used the auto adjust...I missed that part. That is definitely a great feature, I used it all the time when I was working in the research field for many of my images.

 

Great thread. Now only to get Photoshop software...

Bruce

 

This can also be done with just 3 keys on your key-board.
Hold down/press..... Ctrl-Shift-L
This is the short-cut for Auto Levels and is alittle faster if you have alot of photos to go through at the same time.

Speedy

 

http://www.gimp.org

 

I knew you would say that. All in all....Gimp has along way to go IMHO. I've tried it and went running back to PhotoShop.

Speedy

 

Lehigh, sounds like you and I should go to a coin show together, lol. Serious. Next LB? Portland in March?

 

Is there a big coin show that March? What Portland is it in?

 

Portland Oregon, the March ANA. I'll be there for sure. Bringing the wife along on this one, we've never been to Portland yet, looking forward to it.

 

Very nice tutorial. I was fooling around with photoshop a few days ago and made a pretty nice year set for Aussie 10 cent coins.

 

Well, I happen to live in Portland, Oregon...so I'll probably have to go that. I've never been to one before.

 

Try this free online version of Photoshop. It is not as powerful as the professional version you can buy, but probably good enough for most of us. However, the excellent steps shown by Lehigh96 won't be available in the online version.

https://www.photoshop.com/

 

excellent post! thanks for the info

 

Thanks for the tips... I was already doing most of the cropping stuff but the brightness and contrast things are new to me. thanks!!!