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French Coin Re-Image & Some Digital Photography Tips

DarkhorseDarkhorse Posts: 1,377
in World & Ancient Coins Forum
This uncirculated French 10c coin has always been a bit of a challenge for me. Its surface is varied red-brown and splotchy in some areas, the reverse is a busy mass of neoclassical allegorical patriotic hodepodge, every element seems to blend into each other which makes it somewhat hard to make sense of in a photograph. In this photo I managed to get the right lighting which reveals all of its elements clearly. The kid is holding a hammer, you can see the Dupuis signature and you can make out the lion on the breastplate of Marrianne (I didn't notice it was a lion until I saw some of the photos on the screen). Another problem was the automatic metering in my camera, the dark bronze made the camera up the ISO* speed making the shot seem more grainy than it should be, so I used the manual setting so I could take the picture at 50 ISO (I love low ISO, I used to play with 25 speed film a lot).

Anyway, here she is.
image

Now for some digital photography tips. It's not so much digital photography tips so much as digital manipulation tips. One or two of you may find this useful, some of you may feel alienated by this, if you do then I apologize.

As I've mentioned before the best way to take picutres of some coins is to take them in direct light and underexpose a shot. Of course you can't take a straight-on shot of a coin and get direct light on it without YOU getting in the way. I told you before that if you shoot on an angle this problem can be solved.
The problem is that nobody wants a coin picture that's shot on an angle, you want it perfectly round and head on. You have to manipulate the image afterward which is tricky! But I've simplified things and those who use Photoshop or some image editing program may find this useful.

image

What I did was make a page with squares on them. In these squares I centered circles in them for various coin sizes. So I center a coin on a square then I'm ready to shoot.

image

After I've shot a coin I open the image in Photoshop and make a polygon around the distorted square (with the polygonal lasso tool). I copy thatr selection and make a new image (roughly 2000x2000 pixels to be safe, you may want to go less).

image

After I paste the selected polygon in the new image I free-transform/distort it and simply move the points of the polygon so they make a square again!

image

Your coin should seem nice and round after that. then you can do what you usually do to your image in post production. I usually put an elliptical marquee around it and copy-paste it into a new image. The French coin image was made using this sort of technique.

Sorry if the tips above totally flew over your head.
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