I think I have all parts: -- a good camera (Nikon D90 with a Nikkor 60mm Macro Lens) -- a large and an online digitally accessible external storage capability -- Photoshop for uniformly formatting images -- smart enough (I think) to use HTML -- time (I'm retired) but beginning to run short of it (I'll be 80 this year) How do I put it all together? It's the particulars that cause me grief.
Lol...very carefully! There was a guy on CT a while back who created a digital 7070 album. It was really quite beautiful! I saved off the templates he used to build his album, but I can't find them now.
The first secret is to take the best pictures that you can at the highest resolution you can. Then it all depends on how you want your album to look. If you want the coin images to be the same size, I recommend that you resize each image to the size you want. 2 1/2 inches at 300 ppi should give you excellent images. Then decided what you want for the background. I usually use flat black, but that's a personal choice. You can add a background layer behind your image and fill it with whatever color - or lack thereof - that you want. Then decide how many images you want per page. If it's a digital album, you can have one coin per page and keep them in whatever order you want. You can even change the order and insert new coin images later. You can store the album on your computer, tablet, phone and even some of the new watches. You can have it in all those places at the same time, so you'll always have access. It's fun project. ENJOY!
I catalog my coins in Excel as images. Excel will accept files up to at least 2 GB, the largest that I tried. These large files take about a minute to load. Excel has excellent resolution. I convert my photos to Jpegs with 80% compression in PaintShopPro (to limit the file size), copy in PaintShopPro, then paste as bit maps into Excel. Excel has a cropping tool that allows all but the coin to be removed. One drawback, Excel won't print with the correct aspect ratio. Same with printing to PDFs. I have Excel 2013. If anyone is interested reply. Here is a partial screen print at 50% zoom. This is 288%. Again a screen print, photo shopped to one coin. At this zoom, the coin box vertical matches my screen vertical display. Below, the maximum zoom, 400% \
Here's a first trial of a single coin in my album. Yes, I know there's a less than desirable close border around the coin. The problem is that all my coins are in slabs. That makes circular cropping somewhat difficult. I'll play with the Photoshop Paint Bucket to see how well I can fix that. But I would like comments and suggestions about the general presentation. One I've already identified is extraneous marks caused by scratches and rubs on the slab, not on the coin.
If I remember correctly, the printing problem was due to Excel storing the pictures as pixels not dimensions. I'm not familiar with your use of vectoring in this context.
Use a NGC or PCGS registry. All you have to do is plug in numbers, photos and comments. Available online from anywhere.
I've used both of them in the past and wasn't happy with the results. And to further complicate the situation, my coins are a mixture of both NGC and PCGS. No, I'm NOT going to reslab NGC to PCGS nor vice versa. THAT would be more expensive than the album effort would merit. Plus NGC does NOT recognize any 1856 FE's as MS. Apparently they think both Rick Snow and PCGS are wrong.
FWIW NGC does accept PCGS slabs again but doesn't sound like you're interested in going back. The new website is far nicer than the old.
Vector and Raster. Vector is mathematical points on a grid to render with scaling, you can size up and down images without distortion. Raster is more like colored pixels (dot matrix?) and sizing up or down the pixels will distort rather than staying true because they don't have the reference points to stay true. Vector is usually like .AI, .SVG, .PDF Raster is usually like .GIF or .JPEG I'm not sure what you can do with excel or what it does with images though but my concern is just that however you did it, you'd want the images vectored so that clear images stay clear regardless of sizing. If Excel works for this or not I can't say for certain but if not you might not want to use xl and go another way with it that for sure will take the images as vectored for a better finished product.
The only other application that I know that can handle large files and high resolution is PowerPoint. I like Excel because the screen data flows continuously across my monitor, on PowerPoint, data is displayed one page at a time. Also on Excel, I can set an automatic grid (cell) size for the entire sheet. Word cannot handle large files, and Publisher cannot save photos in high resolution.
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