Post a Proof Coin

My favorite! NGC PF 66.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

Ya gotta love Mercury proofs!

 

Carbon spots

 

I am usually mesmerized by Proofs. Really Neat!
These are not the top of the line, but I love Liberty Nickels. This is a PCGS Proof-64 with a green CAC sticker.

 

1873 Pattern Trade Dollar.

 

Trying to work out the kinks on circular cropping on my editor app...the AI cropping tool has some kinks...

 

Before (bottom photo) and after (top photo).

 

Two new ones to revive this thread:

 

NGC calls it MS70, I thought it looked more like a cameo proof.

 

A selection

 

You reminded me that I needed to rephotograph my Statue of Liberty commemorative. Thanks for the push. These sets of the half and one dollar coins are still underappreciated and widely available, cheaply.

 

Yes, it is my favorite US modern commemorative.
BTW, out of curiosity, how many images do you take on average before you animate it? Looks great

 

I have settled on nine photographs per side, after having previously tried 5, then 7.

I have the camera stand and camera mounted on a turntable, and three lights stationary on the desk. There are two lights close to overhead at the 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock positions, and the third is very low to help avoid excessive shadows on the opposite end of the coin (say, at 6:00). You can’t see the turntable, but it’s under the home-made base of my camera stand. The steel plate is just ballast to keep it stable.

I turn the camera at about 10 degree intervals so my 9 shots cover 90 degrees of rotation. The coin is in the exact same position of the camera frame for every shot, since they move as a single unit.



These are ordinary GIF files, but I wrote my own software to help rename the photo files, rotate, and crop the photos, join the obverse and reverse pairs of photos into horizontal and vertical formats (vertical is shown in the post above), and then make the 9 resulting photos into a GIF. There are 9 frames about .13 seconds each, shown as 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 and then repeating.

Here is the software application I use. The area at the top left shows any new photo files. The group of controls at left center let me build up a new file name, taking in the denomination, year, strike type, mint mark, and a counter for how many coins of this type I have - #01, #02, and so on. You can see that I have already renamed the camera files to better names, shown in the list at top left.

Here I have selected two of the files in the list, and my display shows them side-by-side.



I use the controls at the top to straighten and crop the image, as shown in the next photo. I use the plus and minus keys to shrink the green mask around the coin, and the arrow keys to center it. When it is ready I click on "Use as Model", select all 9 obverse images at once, then do "Save". The rotation and cropping are applied to all 9 images and they are saved. (I create 800x800 pixel images for use in the animations, and 1920x1920 extremely detailed images, which are the maximum size CoinTalk allows.)



This is an image after processing.


When all 9 obverse and all 9 reverse images are rotated, cropped, and saved, I select all 18 images in the list, then use "Generate All Images". It combines front and reverse images a pair at a time to build a set of 9 horizontally oriented 1600x800 pixel images, a set of 9 800x1600 images, and horizontally and vertically oriented animations.

Here is one of the horizontally joined images - from obverse photo 01 and reverse photo 01.


It only takes about 15 minutes to take all the photos, align, crop, and animate to get the final result.

All these steps can be performed without my custom software, of course. I thought you might like to see the whole process, even though I way over-answered your question!

 

I know the PCGS photos are glamour shots, but the coin itself is also pretty. It's graded PR 66.

 

After what? Ezest?

 

Thank you very much. No such thing as over answering to someone who barely knows the basic functions of a DSLR. That is fascinating to me and something I would like to get more involved with.