Postumus: A Certificate of Authenticity and questionable photography skills

A pleasant surprise Sallent! Nicely toned neat coin. I think it's nice the dealer takes the time to do the certificates.

 

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I'm with Doug on this one.

 

I have often been tempted by this seller's coins, but have always hesitated because of the photography. But now that I have a better idea of what one of RA's blown-out coins actually looks like, I am more likely to pull the trigger!

Whatever his photo setup — some combination of the lighting and/or digital image adjustment — it blows out the details on the highlights, which occur at the high points of the coins, and which gives them a soft and mushy look.

What I mean by "blown out" is that, for a given pixel in the blown-out area, the color information registers at 0%; thus no information about the object has been preserved in those areas of the image. All details on the high points have been obliterated, not emphasized as Cucumbor thinks, making these coins less attractive to potential buyers, not more. In fact, RA's images are the opposite of detailed.

And this is simply unskilled photography. No matter how many hundreds or thousands of images that are made using the same lighting technique and/or software settings, it's just repeating the same error that many times; where no learning occurs, experience does not equate to knowledge.

RA is not the only dealer that does this, and I don't understand the motive. A misconception, as with Cucumbor, as to what constitutes emphasis of detail? Laziness? It costs a bit of time but virtually nothing materially to experiment until the resulting images appear more "life-like" and therefore salable.

In terms of the certificate, I agree with Doug. Extraneous for an experienced collector but no real harm besides having an extra piece of paper to file away.

 

Welcome to the forum @benhur767

 

Nice Severa coin in your avatar!

 

Thanks, ValiantKnight. But I'm not sure why I show up as "New Member." I've been a member since 2012 and have posts dating back to 2014.

 

Thank you, Mat. It's been in my collection for a few years now, one of my favorite coins. The Severan women are one of my sub-specialties.

 

That title is just based off of how many posts you've made not how long you've been around. You can also change it to whatever you would like.

 

Nice, I focus alot on the ladies too and have become known around here for it. Severan ladies are affordable and usually have decent portrait art to boot.

 

I wrote "wants to emphasize details", didn't say they succeed, did I....

Q

 

Back in film days, I had a great preference for Black and White photography because th film allowed more different tones between black and white than did color films. Digital when saved as JPG images is limited to 256 shades from dark to light in each of three colors. Today we can work in 16 bit with vastly more steps from black to white in each color but still have to reduce to what our equipment will display. It does come in handy when were are stretching scales and might want to save extra tones in one end or the other. After we have saved a file in 8 bit mode, it is easy for us to lose fine differences between almost white and really white and there is no way to recover them. That is why we always save files in their original form as well as what we have processed. This makes much more difference for landscapes than for coins.

 

Sorry I misinterpreted. You're right.

 

No problem, no offense taken

Q

 

Nice example Sallent! The portrait is a definite keeper.

The guy who runs RA I've always found to be a decent and honest dealer. He is also more open to counter offers than not.

Doug is right about the certificates too.

 

What is RA?

 

Romae aeternae numismatics. The seller in op's post