Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;SuperDave, post: 2636783, member: 1892&quot;]Look at the slab. Is the tint on the slab as you would <b>expect</b> the color to be? That&#039;s the purpose of a custom White Balance setting, and why I prefer to do that with pure white rather than shades of gray. Set your white balance however you do it looking at white paper under the exact same light as the coin is getting. When your white balance setting shows that paper as pure white, then you&#039;re going to get the coin&#039;s color right. And by &quot;pure white,&quot; I mean not what your brain tells you is &quot;pure white,&quot; but a block of something you <i>know</i> to be RGB 255, 255, 255 (Hex #FFFFFF), real live honest to goodness white, on your specific screen. Here&#039;s why:</p><p><br /></p><p>Another consideration - and an important one which doesn&#039;t get discussed as often as it should - is that monitors are color-calibrated differently. Some are better with color from the factory than others, and some simply need to have color calibration settings changed before they&#039;re even usable for photography. With that in mind, what you see on your monitor and then post here may not be at all what I see on mine, because my monitor is color-corrected differently. So take any advice on color correction with that grain of salt.</p><p><br /></p><p>Color-correction hardware is <i>expensive</i>. Beyond my means, for the little benefit I&#039;d get from it, because chances are for whatever monitor you own, somebody has already tested it, figured out the correction, and posted those settings online. It&#039;s not perfect, because there are panel-to-panel differences for any but the most expensive screens, but it&#039;s good enough for my purposes, especially when I haven&#039;t factored just how &quot;pure&quot; the white of the paper I just used for Custom White Balance is. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>Now, I did a bit of color correction on your image above. I wasn&#039;t able to make it &quot;perfect,&quot; <i>but on <b>my</b> screen, to <b>my</b> eyes</i>, that slab looks close to what PCGS produces them to look like and by definition the color of the coin therefore follows. I made allowance for a little of the coin&#039;s color being reflected into the translucent plastic, which is something you have to put up with when shooting slabs, and why you don&#039;t use the slab&#039;s appearance in your image as the defining correction feature. Here&#039;s what I ended up with:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]581081[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Part of the reason for the Wall Of Text™ I just posted is to convince you that just learning and setting Custom White Balance (where the camera does all that thinking for you) is a whole lot easier. <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p>For the record, the coin is tilted on its&#039; vertical axis - the right side is in <b>far</b> sharper focus than the left. This is another opportunity for you. These two points have to be incorporated into your technique before working on light placement and diffusion; it&#039;ll only hurt you to try to juggle too many variables at once.</p><p><br /></p><p>You have the equipment, and obviously the motivation and interest, so let&#039;s go get the last 10% of quality you can wring from it. The climb may seem steep, but it&#039;s short and at the end is a plateau that not many others reach.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in