My numismatic photography journey

Actually, I am a student of Ansel Adams (not literally, I never met the man), and pretty much everything I wrote above is consistent with his Zone System, but done with the digital histogram rather than with exposure masking. You can of course go even farther and use HDR multishot techniques, but so far I have not been impressed with the results of any HDR coin image I've taken. The software tends to over-process for sharpness and microcontrast, creating false details and dramatic tone structures which are very unnatural.

“I believe the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.” ~ Ansel Adams

Unfortunately, Adams didn't have opportunity to explore the above, but if he did he would have found that his famous advice to "expose for shadows, develop for highlights" must be inverted for digital due to the differences between film and sensor. Film has more of a hard-stop in the shadows due to sensitivity limitations, and is more forgiving in the highlights, while digital sensors are exact opposite. Thus for digital, the advice is "expose for highlights, process for shadows". The analog nature of film still gives some wiggle room in the over-exposed highlights, but digital sensors have a hard-stop.

Folks giving that advice are probably still thinking of the film days. Unfortunately you can never fully recover over-exposure, even when shooting RAW. There are post-processing techniques, often called "highlight recovery" or similar, which attempt to reduce the damage by grabbing colors from adjacent areas which were not over-exposed, but all they can do is try to fix the color problems. There are even a couple AI-based programs which will try to put details back into the blown highlights, but those almost always look phony. Lost details due to over-exposure are lost forever.

 

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The edits look great, and of course you're the only one who can be sure the end result is true to the coin.

One more piece of advice...try to limit your post-processing to the minimum required to make the image appear like the coin. It's easy to go too far. Something I like to do is to save the settings and then apply them to different coins shot with the same lighting. If the settings make some coins look over-processed, they are probably doing so to all of them to varying degrees, and that's a good indicator you went too far. The wide range of coins you're showing here will give you an excellent palette for refining your post-processing settings.

 

Coinsandmedals...looking at your image again, I think you can improve it a bit by raising the black level to "8". This will push the background to 0,0,0 while also slightly improving the overall contrast.

Question...for the raw coins, did you use the black velvet transfer disk?

 

@rmpsrpms thank you for the tip. I will have to play around with this when I get back home. Yes, I used the black velvet transfer disc for raw coins.

 

One more question...what was your downsizing ratio? The final images are 1920x1920, but your original size was 6000x4000. What processing did you use to get to 1920x1920?

 

Well....I have no idea. I cropped the image and then saved the changes to a file. The file always contains the original (a .CR2 file) and an edited image (a .JPG file). I uploaded the JPG files here as they were smaller.

 

Back when I started, this wasn't the case. In RAW images, Canon cameras were definitely recording valid pixel levels at least a half-stop or more beyond the point that was flagged as "overexposed" on in-camera preview, and on the histogram displayed in Camera Raw Photoshop import. I was skeptical, too, but I was working in a medical imaging lab, and I verified it with our image-processing tools.

If I'd used the in-camera JPEG, or used default settings in Camera Raw, I would've gotten an image with those values pegged at 255, and it would have been as you say. But bringing them in as 16-bit data, not only was there valid data in the highlights, overexposing that way was the best way to maximize shadow detail and minimize noise elsewhere in the image.

Again, though, this was the mid-2000s. I would hope that Canon has progressed to a point where this is no longer necessary, and ideally no longer effective at all. It certainly seems like my 6DII does a better job nailing exposure on its own than the Digital Rebel or 30D ever managed, and you can imagine how much better noise levels are now.

 

Round two: I did my best to brighten these images. I think they more accurately portray the color of the coins. Please let me know what you think. I struggled with the 1806 proof Halfpenny, and I am still not 100% satisfied with the final image.

1806 proof Halfpenny



1937 proof Halfpenny



1806 Penny



1913 Penny

 

Make a cup of tea.

Put on some good music.

Get the coin out.

Fire up the lights and camera.

Try again!

 

What was the approximate cost to get the camera you took those photos with?

 

The proof halfpenny looks like it might benefit from a small tilt toward the lights. That may cause some glare problems but if you're careful you can get the lights and tilt just right to give a bit of pseudo-axial lighting, which may bring out any deep toning colors in the fields. Other than that (which may not actually work) your images look pretty darn good IMO. About the only one I don't like is the 1806 Penny, since the lights are coming in from below and it looks unnatural.

 

I have been experimenting with those methods. I wouldn't have tried it but the surface I was using had a slight wobble, had to prop one side. Now, if I can't find the right look I reset the crutch under the block of wood. Even a twist of the block of wood is helpful.

 

I completely forgot about this thread until it was resurrected! @geekpryde, thank you for the suggestion! I picked up a box of Zeiss wipes last week by coincidence. I’m still working on removing scratches on the slabs. Once things calm down with all of the transitions at work/school, I will take another shot at it.

@rmpsrpms I wish I could try this, but the coin is currently with NGC.

@JCro57 the guy you want to talk to is @rmpsrpms he set me up with everything except the camera. He does top-notch work and is a wealth of knowledge.

 

I did, and he Is GREAT!