Just after I make a post about how good Heritage photos have gotten, I open up my new Peace Dollars with fantastic champagne/light gold toning only to find two blast white coins. Now seriously, tell me that these coins don't look golden toned from those photos! Now here are the final results of my photos after cropping and photoshop adjustments. I promise everyone that my photos are a much better representation of how the coins look in hand. They are still nice coins, but they don't look anything like the Heritage photos! I guess I know which 1924 to keep!
Yes, they do. And I suspect that if you held the coins under the light at just the right angle they would look that way in hand as well. I had a Frankie once, just to look at the coin it appeared quite ordinary with nothing the barest of toning. But if you held it just so, the entire surface of the coin had the most beautiful translucent red toning you ever saw. Took me forever to capture that toning in a picture, but eventually I did. Even your buddies on the NGC forum were amazed when I posted comparative pics, one showing the toning and one not. A lot of them refused to believe it was even same coin.
Clearly those Heritage photos have some while balance issues -- they are too warm. Just look at the insert (which in NGC slabs is slightly on the cool side of white, not the warm side as shown).
Just so you guys know, I always fiddle with Heritage photos before I make a bid specifically to avoid this issue. I crop the photos, resize, and then start the adjustments. Auto levels, auto color, auto contrast. This is what happened to these two coins before I bid (autolevels). They still look toned to me no matter what I did to the photos. I don't mind photos being off as long as I can predict with a measure of accuracy what the coin will look like in hand. Normally, I am pretty close. In this case I was way off. I will say that the detail in the photos has gotten very good.
