My first attempts at photos of copper....thoughts?

Oney

Trying to gain some experience at shooting coins other than silver dollars. How am I doing so far?

LincolnCentMan

Very nice image. It looks way better than most peoples'.

David

messydesk

If the background is a white surface, then notice how it's nowhere near white in the picture. The camera doesn't like to see both very light and very dark. It likes grey. You might want to try overexposing a little (+1/3 or +2/3 stops). If you look at a histogram of the luminosity levels of the entire picture, here's what you get:

There are two spikes. Left one is the most common level of the coin, the right one is the background. The space to the right of the right spike is unused dynamic range of the camera. I adjusted the levels to give an image that "pops" a little more, but doesn't look artificial.

The triangles below the histogram are how I changed the levels. I moved the right one down to the top of the range of the image, making the background, but also the coin, lighter. I moved the middle one to the left so that the dynamic range of the coin would be spread out more. I moved the left one to the right to force more of the dark pixels to black and to darken the coin after lightening it my moving the others to the left. Then I backed off the color saturation just a little.

Oney

Wow! Thanks John....