Animation and Coin Photography

The animations posted so far all help show brilliant aspects of a coin - say, luster or toning.

This example is probably an AU58 brown cent, although the seller says "Lustrous Uncirculated Motley Toned Specimen". Even a coin that is uniform in color shows a 3D effect. The animation shows the texture and the small worn spots on the beard, cheek, and temple very well.

 

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Brilliant silver coins are not easy to photograph. Their high bright-white brilliance causes problems with camera exposure.

The photographer can try to capture the brilliance but the brightest spots will be overexposed. Or the photographer can underexpose the image so the brightest spots retain details, but then the rest of the image is too dark, giving the coin an unnaturally dark appearance.

The image here tries to keep the bright appearance. This coin is a dazzling blast white.

Most of the coin is well rendered. The area above the ear, below the wing, and at the back of the neck have been overexposed to a solid white. The exposure could be shortened to keep from blowing out these details, but the tradeoff is darkening everything else.

An animation can help in two ways. As discussed in this thread, rotating the coin through several photos will demonstrate how the luster moves around the coin.

Second, each lighting angle give the coin a different shape under the lights. A point that is overwhelmingly bright in one frame will have different lighting in the next. This means the photos can be brighter - what is lost in one frame will reappear in the next.

This animation includes the image shown above. The details lost in that frame are compensated for in the others.

Animation may be the key to portraying brilliant coins.

 

This animation shows the effect on a coin that has low relief and essentially no luster. The individual frames have only very subtle differences as the coin is rotated under the lights. Yet, there is a better feeling of realism, as the coin takes on a more tangible representation compared to a still photograph. In particular, the shadowing at the edge of the devices varies from frame to frame, giving the viewer an impression of the depth of the strike.

For this example I have used a vertical orientation, but I also created a horizontal version (like the dime in the previous post).

 

That doesn't look messy. Looks really neat!

 

As a follow-up a year later, the post in Post your coin photography set-up shows the camera setup I use to rotate the coin and camera under fixed lighting.

 

This post is copied here from another thread to capture the current steps I use to create an animation.

Absolutely! Animation and Coin Photography should get you started. The post in Post your coin photography set-up shows my camera setup.

The thread starts with some early attempts, and the process improves with suggestions from other members and improvements with the process.

In short, I put my camera stand on a turntable and light the coin with two or three lights from above. I focus on the coin, tweak the position of the lights, and adjust the exposure to suit. Then I take a picture, rotate the camera+coin platform a bit, and repeat for 9 photos. The relationship between the camera and coin never changes - just the rotational position under the lights. I flip the coin over and take nine of the back.

Then I do some pretty straightforward editing.​

1. Rotate one image so it's straight.
2. Crop it so the coin is framed.
3. Replace the background with black.
4. Resize to a size you like. I use 800x800 pixels.
   
5. Do exactly the same for the other 8, since they all have the same position to the camera, same lights, and same exposure.
6. Do steps 1-5 for the reverse.
7. Join image 1 of the obverse and image 1 of the reverse to make a 800x1600 image. The obverse and reverse can be side-by-side or above and below. You can find examples of both that I have posted.
8. Repeat with the pairs of images 2-9.
9. Feed the 9 images to a GIF animation tool. Each frame is shown for about .12 seconds. Show the frames in the order 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, and set the animation to loop forever.

This simulates moving the coin back and forth under a light, taking a little more than a second to rock it one way, and a second to rock it back.

The suggested thread is only a couple of pages.

Of course, if you have questions, feel free to ask.​

 

My process is similar, but leverages Photoshop layers. Since all images are oriented the same way, I can load them all into individual layers of a single image, rotate the entire canvas, which rotates every layer, and then crop to a square, which crops them all at once, leaving the background in place. Each layer is saved as a separate file, then I use an Imagemagick script to crop out the background, set the background color, and combine the images into a single animated GIF using the same sort of frame sequence as is mentioned above.

 

@lordmarcovan - I ran the original images through a haze filter and rebuilt the animation. I like it better.

 

What software are you guys using?

 

Alas, I wrote my own (since I wanted to rename, size, rotate, and crop the images before joining them), but there are a number of public domain utilities for creating GIF’s from a series of images.

 

I do all my animated gifs using easygif.com.

 

Ok, thank you!

 

Ok, here is my first one.

 

Now for a loose coin:

 

I'm getting better at this now

 

Imagemagick, which is a command-line package for image processing. I wrote scripts using it to make the GIFs. I also use it for other stuff.