I've got a pretty good coin collection. AND I've kept up with the spreadsheet inventory. BUT I've pushed aside the photo inventory. That's a lot of work. So I'm going to try to kick my butt and get it done. The bank is going to get tired of my traipsing back and forth to the safe deposit boxes. I want to do each coin only once. So I want to make sure I collect the images correctly and completely the first time. I think I'll need: -- a reasonably high resolution, well lit image of the obverse and reverse (and the edge if there is significant information there); this image will be larger than screen size. -- a reduced obverse and reverse image (screen size) with the background cropped out; usable for show-and-tell. -- an image of the front and back of the slab. Can you suggest anything else?
Patience....I'm so bad at taking photos that I have to take 20 shots to get 1 that's right. I do like doing it, so it's not so bad. Good luck to you.
Do you need the pictures for like insurance or something? I don't understand what you need the pictures for.
I'd think most folks create the smaller images by reducing the large ones, not as a second set of images. That's something that can be done anytime, you don't need the coins at home. If you have the tools, I'd shoot and keep those large ones in raw format, which will make it easier to make adjustments to white balance later if you decide it wasn't quite right. That's often the problem I have, when I line up one image next to the others I realize the color isn't quite right.
Here's a sample of what I want and what I can do. I noticed something immediately; I need to adjust my lighting so that it is uniform across the whole coin. Comments, please. CAUTION: The first image is large. I'll try and post it as a link rather than an image. http://www.dcderoo.com/50-1941-No_AW-o-nPF65.jpg
For the images with the background cropped out there was a great link posted over in the ancients section yesterday. I can't remember the thread, but will post directly to the site. It lets you remove the back ground from a picture in about 5 seconds with just a couple mouse clicks... https://www.remove.bg/
Me too. Plus I subscribe to a site that gives me unlimited storage. I can roll my images out to it and link them to a post in a heartbeat. That's where the above WL images came from.
Set up an assembly line... Shoot all the full slabs at once. You can fuss to get the lighting and camera position correct, then position click position click. I even designed and 3d printed a jig... it's a base plate that I attached with command strips and several click in slab holders (prongs of appropriate size to hold the slab flat, with an edge to align to)
I highly recommend a photo copy stand with 4 lights and a remote shutter. You can take pics quicker than the editing but very rarely will you need to re-take. The lighting required constantly changes depending on the coin. Bright silver vs dark copper, vs toning, takes different levels of light from different angles to achieve pleasing pics. There is no one size fits all light set up unfortunately. The slabs usually need to be tipped a bit to avoid the glare or capture just the right luster or toning that you want in the pic. Set your white balance manually if you can. Most editing programs can fix the white balance fairly well and take the yellow hue out if needed. Just thought I'd add, I do not photograph everything. Some stuff isn't worth it. Some stuff is. Some stuff is worth it but I just haven't done it. I take pics for the registries and significant examples within the collection. Maybe not exactly the info you're looking for but just trying to save you some time.
I can't think of anything that I have that isn't worth imaging. The only 20th century material I have is in my type set and my birth year set. Oh, and part of my Early Commemoratives set. And it's ALL slabbed by PCGS or NGC.
I have a few thoughts that may help. I really messed up when I was doing this and it took me a long time to get everything fixed. Actually I'm still not finished. Create a really nice directory to store the images in. Do this from the start. It's a pain trying to catch up later. The camera will create a file name for each image. Don't loose that. It gives you a timeline that is helpful when trying to find an image. I rename by adding to the file name the camera gave it. This keeps the images sorted and keeps all the images of each coin together. Example. 1861 10c 0026.jpg or Dime 1861 0026.jpg I'm always going back and shooting a coin again. It's nice to keep all of them together. I save every image just the way it comes off the camera and never mess with it. It becomes the master file, I can always use later. You can do a save as and edit that image and keep the master safe. When it comes to resizing, you can do a batch process of many images at the same time. With these I create a file name something like this. 1861 10c 600X 0026.jpg Coin Talk is really cool. You don't have to resize every image. The site software does that for you when it's uploaded. Other sites are not always that friendly. I guess what I'm saying is to plan ahead.
To add to @ldhair - if your camera can shoot raw, or raw+jpg do so and definitely keep the raw file. Yes they run 20MB each, but storage is cheap and you can reprocess them 10 or 20 years from now for whatever you need at the time. Those who followed the "wise people" in the days of the 640x480 or 800x600 monitors and only kept the heavily processed jpg file in those sizes are the ones having to reshoot everything again.
@ldhair, using image filenames with spaces in them sometimes causes problems when you try to post them. I think that it was a difficulty in the past (15-20 years ago). Some sites still will not accept image filenames with spaces. There's one that I frequent that has that problem. So in all of my filenames there is a hyphen where I used to use a space.
