Post your coin photography set-up

Here's a good thread that talks about lighting setups:

https://www.cointalk.com/threads/coin-photos-lighting-requirements.275384/

 

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@SuperDave made me rethink the use of my Sony superzoom and my wife's little Nikon point and shoot. Both have zoom.

So I went with the iPhone instead. This simplifies the setup. The toilet paper roll is not fancy (!) but the closest focus for an iPhone is about 4 inches. The white paper also keeps the brown cardboard of the roll from reflecting onto the coin and affecting white balance.

I am using Camera+ on the phone. It gives me precise control over all features. I use -0.7 eV to keep from blowing out the highlights. You can make out a circle and square overlaying the image, like this.


The square sets the focus area, and the circle sets the area to use to compute auto-exposure. The slider at the right is a digital zoom which I set to 3.4x. That lets me use the grid lines on the display to position the coin perfectly straight.

This is the mounting for the coin.


The black foam serves as the backdrop. It is a dime holder so the cent sits on top of it. The 2x2 holder gives the foam some support so I can move it around easily. The gray card is homemade and is used to check exposure and white balance. The black felt underneath is just another background I was trying. The two strips of museum board allow me to adjust the angle of the coin.

Finally, this is an early result. All I did was move the TIFF files to my PC and crop them to size.


This is a reverse with a bit more tilt toward the lights. It has great color but seems harsh to me.

 

Judging from the size of the Cent image, I think you're a little bit too close for optimal focus. It's larger than I'd expect, and blurrier; experiment with moving away a little bit to see if it becomes sharper.

One more thing, for a nicer touch. Run down to the local hardware store and grab a Well Nut:


They're rubber coated while remaining pretty precisely dimensioned, and can "stand off" a coin from the background so it fades completely away, leaving the coin the only thing in focus. Like so:



That way there's no need to spend time in postprocessing cropping the background out for something that looks nicer.

 

Well you asked for it. Most of the time I use the camera and lighting you see in my photos. I also have a Epson V330 scanner and a Dino-Lite that I use. When I want to take a photo of the rim of a coin I have a flashlight reflector for that, and of course there is the cell phone, that I used to take the photos of the camera and lighting.

 

Works so far...

 

Thanks so much, Ray. I did the search, found the thread, and followed some more links after that. This is all terrific information.

If I can digest all (or some) of what people know and see how far I can get with my simple iPhone setup, maybe there is a little bit I can contribute in that corner. The lighting suggestions alone have already paid benefits.

But it would pale in comparison to the great strides you guys have made in setting the standard for coin photography.

 

I have made some progress with the iPhone. Here are two photos of the same coin. The top image is "before", the second one "after". I took advantage of the advice above.

The two main differences are both in the lighting. The Jansjo lights are in a more axial position above the coin. And I use a small strip of museum board to shim up the edge of the coin to better show the coloration. Both of these are shown above in post #102.

The angling of the coin helps remove the specular reflections on the face and right side of the bust. It also reveals the color of the surface better, instead of showing the coin as a flat brown. You can see that the fields above and below LIBERTY look dark and mottled in the first shot, but are actually subtle and attractive toning in the second.

The photos do not have quite the resolution of the shots with a bellows, but I like the presentation and coloring for web use.

 

Happy to see I'm not the only one grabbing things from kitchen and bath to set up for a photo.
Coffee mug just right.....coffee cup too short ha!!!!

 

Another step forward with the iPhone.

I thought the images above were pretty good, until I held the coin up next to it. They just didn't have the rich color of the coin in-hand.

I changed over to full manual. I shot this with ISO 25, 1/350 sec and white balance at 3500. I zoomed to 4.3x and filled the screen with the image. The colors are more saturated, although just a bit dark. (1/250 might be better.)

This is much closer to what I see.

 

You've vastly exceeded the median eBay seller's images already. Great job!

 

Thanks. So many have contributed so much before me. I'll be thrilled if I can find a path to help anyone else.

 

You're already doing that by asking your own questions publicly. The dialogue that generates is being read by many who never post - this thread now has 111 posts (once I post this) and almost 9,000 reads.

 

After learning how to deal with the lighting and exposure using the iPhone, I went back and tried the Sony again. I have repeated the two photos from above, and added this new one taken using the same setup, but with the Sony DSCH9 superzoom set at Macro and 2.5x zoom.

 

The bottom photo pair is very good. A little less exposure (does the camera have exposure compensation?) would eliminate the blown highlights in the hair, forehead and face, and could be compensated easily.

 

I have set the camera to full manual. I then adjust the exposure while keeping at ISO 100 and f5.6. The exposure is adjusted until the display shows -0.7 eV, so that's 2/3 of a stop underexposed.

That does reduce the blowout quite a bit compared to the first set of the three. Maybe if I went to -1.0 eV underexposed, the shorter exposure would keep those remaining bright spots within acceptable limits. Then I could brighten it a little in post-processing.

I am puzzling over one thorny issue. It seems like it should not even be an issue...

What color is a coin, and how do I know if I have matched it?

I have a window, three desk lamps with various bulbs, and a pair of Jansjo lights. The coin looks different under each. Then I have two monitors of exactly the same type, plus a laptop, Kindle, and iPhone, but the color is different between each of them. I've tried calibrating and matching by eye, so I hope I'm close.

I don't know if the picture I am publishing here shows up the way the coin does. How do people manage that?

 

The best you can do on color is by first color matching your camera to your lighting, which is best done by having only one color temperature lighting. So block out your window, use only one type of lighting, figure out what temperature it is, set the camera to it. Or do a manual white balance (I don't know if the phone will do this) by shooting something white under your lighting and use that to set the camera).

Then second, for monitors there are gadgets that will correctly calibrate the color on your monitor. You cannot control how well my monitor sees your image, that's up to how well (usually *if*) I have calibrated my monitor.

 

The issue is that the camera's interpretation of -0.7EV is based on its internal metering. Do you have a live histogram available? That's usually the best way to eliminate hotspots, especially for copper coins. Most cameras meter luminance, so they will allow an individual color channel to blow out as long as the luminance is OK. For copper, this means the R channel is very easy to blow out, and is one of the reasons copper is harder to image than silver. If you use the histogram in RGB mode (not luminance) you can adjust the exposure until the R channel is just below saturation. If you don't have a histogram to manually meter with, you will need to ensure the camera is metering on the highlights. And if that can't be done, then all you can do is take the shot, view the histogram (or mouse over the highlights and view the RGB values) in an image processor, re-adjust the exposure, take the shot, and repeat until you are no longer over-exposing the image.

Really excellent question. My reference is ODFL (Overhead Diffuse Fluorescent
Lighting). This is the color I would see when buying or selling the coin at a coin show. I find that diffused Jansjo LEDs, shot from a high angle, with WB properly set, very closely approximate these conditions.

edited to add: another valid reference would be incandescent flex lamp. Some dealers use these at their tables. Turns out the Jansjo LEDs do a decent (though not perfect) job of matching to incandescents.

another edit: here is your last image showing the blown out red highlights. As you can see, a significant amount of the image is over-exposed in the R channel, with a few pixels showing G blowouts as well. This means that all areas shown are not color-correct. Because they are blown out in R, this makes those areas appear less red than they should be.

 

My set up is a Canon XS body on a Canon FL bellows mounted on a converted B&L microscope stand. Lighting is 4 diffused jansjo lamps.

 

Is that a Kodak 89mm f3.8 Printing Ektar?

 

Yes it is. Thank you for that tip as well.