As many know, I am a very longtime collector of Silver coins, primarily Dollars, and Halves. Recently, I have branched out to nickels, and foreign silver coins. At any rate, given that I have plenty of indoor time with the pandemic, I would love some suggestions on improving my photography. My coin photography skills are awful, which is surprising, since I do nicely on nature and landscape photography. I use either of two cameras, a Nikon D5600 24.5 megapixel body with two lenses, an 18-55mm zoom, and a 55-300 zoom. My other camera is a Leica D lux 7 pocket camera with a 25-75 mm zoom, 17 megapixels. In addition, I have the dual camera iPhone XS Max. What techniques would you folks recommend for better photography? The results are poor, as coins come out dark, or extremely glare prone. Details get washed out, or the exposures are not reflective of the coin’s luster. Those of you that have seen my coin pictures, I would LOVE your suggestions. For post processing, I have Photoshop and Lightroom latest versions on my computer (MAC version), and Photoshop express on my iPad Pro. Thanks in advance, Morgandude11
I suffer the same disorder and am very interested to hear what the pros have to say. At the moment, I feel one photo of a coin is not enough, so I would be interested in how to turn the aforementioned good photos into GIFs
Well very first thing I would say is use the D5600. It is a DSLR and it is just better overall. Also, it seems what is causing you problems is your lighting. Coins are naturally more attractive when you can see their luster and when they seem to have lots of luster. For that reason, lighting is extremely critical. First, you want to go to a room with no other light leaking in. Close your windows/doors and basically black the room out. Then, you want at least two strong lights. I have some big IKEA lights but I changed the bulbs out to 13 watt 1575 lumen lights at a 5000k temperature. Basically, all that means is that it is a very very bright light bulb with a lightly blue color. I have three, and when the three are on, I have to wear sunnies otherwise I would be blind. So make sure you get extremely bright bulbs at a temperature around 5000k. Another thing is you want to use a tripod. You didn't mention tripods of any sort in your list of equipment, so make sure you get one or find one to use. Make sure you get a nice and sturdy one and then screw in your camera tightly. Then you want to use a self timer. This is so that there is absolutely no shake after you press the shutter button. This is another critical thing because you lose detail otherwise. Now camera wise, get your lens in manual focus and then use live view on your D5600 to zoom in digitally on a letter or some details. Carefully turn the focus ring until it is sharp and not faded or blurry. Then for your settings, you'll want to go to manual mode (yes MANUAL, not auto). Set your ISO to the lowest it can be, which I think is 100 for the D5600. Set your aperture to around F7. Then, use live view to judge your shutter speed. With my three lights, ISO at 100, and aperture at F7 ish, my shutter speed tends to fall at around 1/125 to 1/80. Then for the lens, I would use the 55-300 or the 18-55 at 55. The thing with 18-55 is that it tends to distort the image and make things on the edge stretch. Our eyes see at around 60mm with crop factor, so for your camera it would be around a 50mm length. Some more quick tips, use a microfiber cloth to wipe down the coin/holder and get rid of all finger prints or dust. Unfortunately, you can't do anything about scratches, but try to get as much stuff out of the way. Also, make sure not to get your camera or yourself in the reflection of the slab or the surface of the coin. Now for editing the images, I prefer to use Apple Photos. Try to do the least amount of sending to other devices to keep the highest resolution. Then just play around with all the settings to really understand what they do. Once you have the hang of those, you can usually save most images even if they are too dark or too bright. And that's about it for simple images. Now if you want to do more editing for a composite or to get rid of the background, then I would suggest you make an account on Canva.com. To get rid of the background, I usually put my image in Canva and then use the circle elements to cover the background. Make it a color that is not on the coin but easy to identify. Download the picture. Then go to https://onlinepngtools.com/create-transparent-png and drag and drop your image. Enter the color that you chose for the background and enter a percentage of similarity. On the right, the image with a transparent background will appear. Download that image. Then you can make a template on Canva to make composites with, for example, the obverse, reverse, and the label. Here are my best pictures from using all these methods.
Start by watching this video. You can skip stuff at the end about selecting a cheap camera. Then post pictures you're having problems with and we can discuss how to fix them.
Thanks. If you don’t mind, I will copy and paste your post, with your permission, and print it out. I have two field tripods, for nature photography, and can do a dark room setup, with Klieg type lighting. So, I will definitely try your method, as your pictures of going are beautiful.
This is a bit less standardized, more time consuming, and trickier. My process: 1. Position the coin under the camera. 2. Pick up the lights, one in each hand, and move them around the coin, observing how the luster flashes, making sure that the amount of lighting the coin gets is consistent. You're doing this to plan how to take the pictures. 3. With your spare hand (you don't have one), pick up the remote trigger for the camera. 4. While moving the lights around the coin like you wanted, take 6 pictures to cover the lighting range. If you bump the camera or coin in the process, start this step over Next, crop them, save individually, and make them into a GIF. Lots of ways to do this, but this is my workflow: 5. Open all 6 frames in a single workspace in Photoshop, with each frame occupying a single layer. 6. Crop to the bounding square of the coin. This will do all 6 frames at once. 7. Save the stack as individual frames with filenames image-1.png to image-6.png. 8. Use a bash or Python script and Imagemagick to do the circle crop and GIF composition, going in the following order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2. I delay changing from frame 1-2 and 6-5 by just a little so that when the loop repeats, it appears more natural. Steps 5-8 might not be feasible for your setup, experience, or comfort level. There are other ways to combine files into GIFs. Google is your friend here. 6 frames is the number I chose to keep a single side of a coin, using a 600x600 image down to about 3 MB. This made a pair of GIFs for a single coin reasonably e-mail friendly. I've used 15 for a couple Dan Carr holographic coins, because they need it. I could use 100 if I wanted, but that starts becoming a huge amount of data to process and would be about 50 MB per side.
If you are able to reverse the mast of your tripod so that the camera hangs below, do it, as it will be far more stable and you won't have the legs in your way. This is my standard setup at shows, because it's a lot easier to travel with a carbon fiber tripod than a heavy copy stand.
Here are two older threads that explore some of these areas in more depth. The summaries above, of course, are really good, clear, and concise, so these threads may prove to be more for background than essential reading. Post your coin photography set-up Animation and Coin Photography
I could easily do that, as I work from home as a computer specialist. I can code in Python and do layers in Photoshop easily. I have a 27” iMac Pro, and do use python.
I think the package you want for Python is Wand. I'm using bash scripts, myself, and some day I want to change to the C++ ImageMagick API to speed everything up. ImageMagick is a ridiculously powerful scripting tool for batch processing images. Let us know how it goes.
C++ is much easier and faster in which to write instructions. If you ever figure out how to change to that, please let me know. Many thanks.
All my Morgan pictures come out so terribly. Now that I have lots of time in the house, I want to learn to do it right, as some of my high grade coins come out looking like crap. Many, many thanks!!
Lots of interesting advice above. As a professional coin photographer, I appreciate the journey and challenges to getting great coin images- to help, here's a short summary of the tips and techniques for raw coin photography that I've developed to take images like these; First, I recommend you use axial lighting with a studio strobe. You can easily shoot at f14, which for my lens is a nice depth of field spot, and the lowest native ISO, which for Nikon is 200, and use the maximum sync shutter speed your camera allows. My camera is 1/200 shutter speed. This lets you to ignore all the ambient light in the room and direct only the studio light for maximum quality depth of field and many other light control benefits. High shutter speeds mean sharper images. Your 60mm lens is ok, but a 105-macro lens is better as it allows you to be farther away from the coin but still pull a 1:1 image. Farther away is also better because you can get more light to the face of the coin- your 60mm means your closer to it, leaving less room for light control when focusing at your minimum focus distance. I read somewhere above that your lens's min. focus distance was only about 7 inches? My lens has a min. focus distance of 12". I suggest using a full frame camera, (the D90 has a cropped sensor) but that's a much bigger investment. It depends on what you want to do with the final images. **Very important** Make sure the camera’s film plane and the coin face are parallel! Depth of field is tiny as it is in macro so don’t waste a millimeter of it. Don’t focus at the highest point of the coin; you’re wasting focus As a general rule, focus about 1/3 of the way into the area you want in sharp focus. With thicker coins beyond the single image depth of field range, use focus stacking and combine the images. I use that often enough to include it here. Keep the coin off the background. Place the coin on a pedestal. I use a clear plastic cap from one of my wife's pump hairspray bottles. Use a rock-solid copy stand- much easier to work with than a tripod and doesn’t get in the way. Use a camera remote trigger or cable release. Even with a fast shutter speed, you don't want camera motion during capture. SHOOT IN RAW - is in all caps because I can’t stress enough how important that is for quality and editing the image. For me, image editing in ACR & Photoshop should take only 3 to 10 minutes a coin, depending on several factors. I edit hundreds of coin images every week and I have created a set of Photoshop Actions to keep my workflow focused, minimal and consistent. Make sure you White Balance is set to your light source. If you don’t know the color temperature of your light source, all the more reason to shoot in raw- you can adjust it there. Use color correction tools and software during capture and editing- I like the x-rite color checker passport. Tether your camera to your computer- shoot through Lightroom at minimum, so you can preview your images as soon as they are shot. I use “Control my Nikon” so I can use live view for precise focusing, when necessary, and a host of other valuable features. This is not an in-depth guide, but an overview, so if you have any questions, please let me know. I'd be happy to help. This shot below was not axial lighting, but a diffused lighting technique I use for certified slabbed coins, shot through the plastic case, of course.
At the risk of getting skewered in this thread, most people would likely be surprised how good a newer iphone picture can be for coins and certainly much better than many of the camera photos we see
