Show us some of your macro work.

Those are very nice! You really brought out the depth of the design. I see what you mean about the almost PL look of the coin. You can really get a sense of the surfaces of the Walking Liberty Half.

 

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Now that's the cool stuff I'm talking about! It makes me think of the 3-D scanned and then rendered images you see. I'm curious as to what software you are using to generate that?

 

You have the beginnings nailed. The relief of that design at that magnification would certainly be in need of probably around 2-3 images to get a really nice full depth image.

 

Thank you........I've thought of doing the image stacking thing, but it ain't out the gate yet. Learning curve and all........

 

I think when you showed me that coin, it was in an AU-58 holder (ICG maybe?). I think I looked at it and said it shouldn't be AU, should be UNC at least. Did you ever re-submit it?

 

Kripes Larry. Don't 'play' with me with that '55. I thought it might be the Scotch......

 

I use two different lenses. They are the 75mm Rodenstock APO-Rodagon D 1:4 Duplicating Lens and a Tominon 35mm Macro Lens that was designed to be used on a large format Polaroid Macro system. They are mounted on a Vivitar bellows system with focusing rail. Everything is mounted on a small copy stand. The higher magnification work was done using the Tominon lens and the others were done with the Rodenstock with the bellows mostly extended. The Post Production is really not as intimidating as you might think, I use Helicon Focus to combine the images. It's all an automated process.

 

Heck, I'm mostly happy (of late) if I can just get a nice image of my new Grandson. No Macro needed.......

 

I have not done anything like that yet. But I'm really considering starting a blog.

My website is in my signature below.

 

We passed so many coins around the table over the years at Fun, I forgot what coin that was. This is the 1955.

 

Well, I clearly remember you showed me a 55DDO that was in an AU slab, and I thought it was UNC. So, unless you have more than one, I'm going to say that this was the same one and I was right

 

It's just as bad with Vodka.

 

I'll bet you a bottle of wine at Fun that I'm right. Oh wait, you won't be there. That's ok. You can buy next year.

 

I currently don't have a good focus stacking setup, so I'll show pointer of what I do with my normal workflow.

My shots like this are limited to tens of thousands of point and shoot images taken handheld through a stereoscope. Images like the OP image are typical, although usually at higher magnification. What I do when I post-process these is convert to grayscale by saving only either the green channel or red channel. Colorful toning can be distracting when illustrating a die variety. In the image below, I saved the red channel, which diminishes the brown toning above the date. In other cases, I save the green channel, because it has the least amount of noise. The blue channel is rarely useful by itself. Next, I increase the contrast. Clipping highlights and shadows is OK if there is no meaningful information lost. This wouldn't be advisable on a color image. Finally, a little bit of sharpening, and now the OP picture is bolder and sharper.

My goal for these kinds of pictures is to make die variety diagnostics easy to see in a 600x450 image on a browser, and usable printed at 1" x 3/4" on a label.

 

Show off.

 

It was all done with Helicon.

 

I know you guys have more images to share.

 

Here's are some recent ones I did for Cuds on Coins listings

 

And here's a 58D RPM#1 I did for fun: