I'm in the crowd of those using black velvet for my background. It has been giving me results I like for several years now, and is super adaptable to whatever lighting config I desire to use: I have cut about a 4 inch square out of a square yard of new fabric I bought for the purpose (= never laundered) and this is placed on a special stand with a 2x2 inch platform that I can move in three directions for ultra fine adjustments down to about 1-2 microns or so including vertically for focus. It also let's me add a goniometer to the stack for vertical angular adjustment when I need exactly the right angle of incidence for the lighting or parallelism in the focal plane. The unused cloth is kept in the bag I brought it home in, kept in a closed drawer for fresh backup (haven't cut it again for over a year). I keep a toothbrush I bought for the purpose on the copystand to use to brush the surface prior to a shot if any specks of anything are visible in the viewfinder. There is a trick to brushing the velvet that I will not try to go into here, but when done correctly will yield a consistent flat black. For the camera I am using a Canon Rebel that is linked directly to a computer so all the composition and light balancing is done on the computer screen. It sounds fancy to say it that way, but it's really pretty meat-and-potatoes. For daylight I am using 5200-5600K LED bulbs in gooseneck lamps, and for "tungsten" I have a set of 3 3200K small bulb Jansjoe lights which I rarely use. With this setup I don't have to struggle with balancing coins and can get all the adjustments I need for a shot. The background is consistently black and uniform.
@TIF, I think I had understood that at first reading. And the result is really excellent. My comment wasn't meant to say the velvet has better results, but a simple and cheap alternative way of doing things. As stated by @Severus Alexander, I have sometimes to adjust a bit the black point too though. Anyway, each of those solutions saves a lot of time blackening the background pixel after pixel, which is dead bore ! In the end I'm amazed to see how, everyone of us in their study or garage, have been thinking about it and found very similar solutions to the "background situation". Q
With a title of "A Blacker Black" I keep expecting someone to break into a chorus of "A Whiter Shade of Pale"
@TIF another source of carbon nano tube black paint. Sounds like it is difficult for the non-scientist to get. Carbon nano tubes are a really cool material with lots of interesting properties. The guy that runs the company is an old fraternity brother of mine and was just interviewed on NPR https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/16/n...nt-rival-anish-kapoor-vantablack-design-news/ https://www.nano-lab.com/carbonnanotubeproducts.html
Thats a great idea @TIF . Ive seen that paint before, but it never occured to me that I could use it in coin photography
To the first guy who posted: I haven't done this myself but, conceptually at least, you should be able to come pretty close to vantablack by using laser toner on glue paper. Probably really messy to set up too! Rasiel
Yeah, that would be extremely messy! The black paint is working well but I'm also going to buy a swatch of black velvet next time I'm at a fabric store. P.S.-- not a guy
Very tempting, but perhaps I've gone overboard in the quest for black. Several people here are getting fantastic results with black velvet! Also, regarding the Singularity paint you linked: Sounds like the paint would be prone to chipping and flaking, plus having to bake it would reduce the application potential. It's interesting though!
A $22 bottle of paint is not "going overboard". Something like this is going overboard. What is the recommended cheap/easy setup for white backgrounds these days?
I'm very sorry for this. This aging Gen Xer should know better! Velvet is definitely the cheap and easy way. I use it for shooting video and keep glue paper (coincidentally enough!) next to it to get as much lint and shtuff off. If you've seen pet hair removal rolls with peel off sheets that comes in real handy. Rasiel
Hello Ed, the cheap/easy setup is a sheet of paper. To avoid shadows just use a prop to put some distance between the coin and paper. This throws the background out of focus making it featureless. You're still going to have to do some post-processing if you want true white backgrounds. Rasiel
I dont know about professional setups, but an amateur one is incredibly easy and uber fast. Below are some pics of what I will describe. A medium grey background, in this case from a simple notepad turned over to its cardboard back. A small plastic tub used as a riser on which the coin sits. A cel phone (iPhone 6s) set on top of a couple coin boxes and some coasters (to get the right focal distance). 5k bulb, manipulated for each shot to get the right exposure. Very simple. A simple setup, I used by daughters phone to take the shot (which I dont ever use, so its crappy, but gives the idea): The two raw images stitched, and not resized at all: After the background is removed and image resized for web use: Certainly not a professional setup, but it works for most things. I have a very hard time getting a phone to get anything smaller than a hemidrachm without being very blurry.
LED tracing light boxes are pretty cheap these days. I prefer black backgrounds myself, but for white backgrounds my best results have been with something like this. https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-thin-Brightness-Sketching-Stencilling-X-rayViewing/dp/B01M26S3VY/
Thank you for posting that. I've been a fan of lightboxes since the days we used them for work with transparencies. I was going to suggest building one, but this is a simpler solution and in this case cheaper too. For about the same cost as this unit I ordered a 6x12 inch sheet of 1/8th inch sign grade polycarbonate. That would have been just the beginning and less flexible than the sketch box, and much more cumbersome too. For the portability factor I ordered one, and can't wait to see what all it can do. And I too prefer a black background, but print publishers don't. Nice to have all the right tools in the kit. To protect the surface I will use a thin sheet of mylar to cover the screen so coins will not scratch it. I had a scanner years ago with a glass bed that I put the coins on. No matter how careful I was in placing a coin, after just a couple of years it had nicks and scratches so bad they showed up in images. Mylar/polyester sheets to the rescue.