Great and inexpensive method of making your own "indirect" lighting for coin pictures. Read on: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/essays/vanRiper/020809.htm This has helped me with my pic taking:
xA lot of good info so far. For the cost conscious, an economical photo editing program is avaialble from Google. It's called Picassa.. and it's FREE Crop, tint, color intensity, ambient light adjust, rotate, highlight, file, etc.