A photo experiment of my own.. using Phil's angle technique
spoon
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It's been a while since I've been had the time to take any coin pictures. This nice Italian has bugged me every time I've tried to shoot it... so, I dug through the recesses of my PC and found the template Phil made once upon a time and tried his technique on it. Results are below.
Old pic. Freehand shooting roughly overhead, single light source.
New pic. Still freehand and one light, but using Phil's template to center and skew.
After applying auto contrast (not sure if I like this better?)
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, here is his tutorial (all pics have since gone offline!). Quick summary: using the template, center the coin in an appropriate ring, shoot wide enough to contain the entire square, then in Photoshop select the four corners of the square with Polygonal Lasso Tool, then right-click to Free Transform and have fun with Skew or Distort until the selection is a proper square. The benefit of this technique is that it allows you to capture more color in the toning on silver coins.
Here is the raw photo I used for the eagle side:
Here's the template. Be sure your printer DOES NOT automatically resize it to fit the page!
Old pic. Freehand shooting roughly overhead, single light source.
New pic. Still freehand and one light, but using Phil's template to center and skew.
After applying auto contrast (not sure if I like this better?)
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, here is his tutorial (all pics have since gone offline!). Quick summary: using the template, center the coin in an appropriate ring, shoot wide enough to contain the entire square, then in Photoshop select the four corners of the square with Polygonal Lasso Tool, then right-click to Free Transform and have fun with Skew or Distort until the selection is a proper square. The benefit of this technique is that it allows you to capture more color in the toning on silver coins.
Here is the raw photo I used for the eagle side:
Here's the template. Be sure your printer DOES NOT automatically resize it to fit the page!
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Comments
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It's a super-lustrous coin and that much was kind of left out of these pics, but they do highlight the color better than before. I'll have to retry the eagle side.. it came out a bit muted.
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I prefer the "after contrast" pic, but which one most closely resembles the actual coin in hand?
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