How to submit registry pictures
Mikesp1
Posts: 41
Is there a "how to" guide on submitting registry pictures? Must we submit them with a certain format in mind. Any help is appreciated. Thanks from Mike
0
Comments
Some of the newer scanners work better thn the older ones, but the scanners tend to flatten the image and wash it out so you don't get the shiny luster.
With a digital camera a steady camera tripod or rest is needed to get the best shot.
What I do is take a low res 200dpi photo or scan of the coin in the slab (handy for insurance purposes, should it ever be needed, or other uses). Save that image as a normal project image in the photo editing software.
Then I take two hi-res photos or scans of the coin (obv and rev). I then crop just the coin image and a bit extra around the edges, and paste these two images into one large image (wider that it is tall), and save that out as a project or image file.
Now to create a small image I load a copy of the original (after you get better at it you could skip this part).
I then change the image size to a smaller size, then I make the image editing program save that out as a JPEG image/picture file.
If the image is too large (you can't go over about 95k bytes in size, you can resize the image even smaller and save it again.
Eventually you can come up with a image size that you can use repeatedlly after you have done it a few times.
Some image editing programs have options that let you increase the compression or decrease compression when it creates the JPEG image file.
As you increase the compression the image quality goes down, descreasing compression improves the image quality.
Some image editors have some screen information on how big the image or picture is or will be. It depends on what program your using.
If a coin has some feature that might be of more interest, I can dig out my digital camera microscope and zoom in on that feature (up to 200x) and take a photo of it as well. With the microscope and camera lighting becomes a big issue. I would suggest you use a florescent light and not incandescent and florescent lighting is more white and shows colors better, wheras incandescent tends to be more red or yellow. Usually you have to angle the lighting orcamera slightly to get the luster or coin highlights to work out right. try to get the best photo to work with as it's easier to work with when you want to enhance the image with the editing software.
I use an HP scanner; the scans of the lightly toned coins typically look darker than they are. Silver coins
usually come out looking good. DCAM Proof coins sometimes show alot of glare.