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It's getting hard for coins to live up to their pictures
learningcoins
Posts: 73 ✭✭
With all of the great photographers out there it seems that the coin in hand does not live up to the photographs. People are able to get great pics showing great color and unless I study and tilt the coin in hand just right, it never quite seams as nice. Maybe this is good that people are able to capture a coins best, but sometimes I feel bad when the coin arrives. Anyone else ever experience this?
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The coin itself should still always look better in hand then any photograph.
Its just sometimes to see the color pop that you see in photos
If you end up with a coin that has less color then it's photograph it has to do with post image editing enhancement... A.K.A. Juicing.
I could be all wrong here but it seems some dealers either have all knockout coins or have the juice pouring in the photo rooms. Prob. a little of each
Photos can be juiced, blown up, exaggerated & improperly lit. If you like the coin in hand, then that's all that should matter. I don't care what the plethora of images looks like. I keep the coin, if I like how it looks in hand.
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It's cool to get a glamour shot of your coin, but it can be tough to buy a new coin if that as your only info about it.
I've been fortunate many more times than not, thankfully. Usually I get what's pretty close to the picture but sometimes the coin is amazingly better. But once in a rare while I'll get something that has an issue that I couldn't see in the picture. I don't know, maybe I'm lucky or just good at scrutinizing the pictures. I should also mention one tactic is that I play with Photoshop a lot. I'll put the picture in Photoshop where I can try and tweak it to see if it brings out anything not readily visible.
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I agree with the above.
I just bought a coin from eBay that I admittedly "took a shot on" that I thought was a good deal, but let's just say it was highly optimistically photographed.
It was cheap and I won't return it, but it looked very little like the pic.
Glamour Shots are so yesteryear as the new trend is Cartoons which unlike Glamour Shots you can not tell anything as to luster, marks, or rub.
Yes! The best way to learn this is to play around with photography and editing software.
It's no different than what we see today in fashion magazines and advertisements. Models and movie stars actually look pretty much like the rest of us..... just with more makeup, more post-photography editing, perfectly tailored & pressed clothes, and a fussier hairdo. Savvy but unscrupulous coin vendors do the same thing to their wares. Sex sells. Pretty tarnish sells.
The best coin photo shows the coin more-or-less as it looks in hand. Of course, reflectivity and luster are impossible to capture perfectly and the rendition on my monitor is different than on yours..... some of us are colorblind to varying degrees, etc. etc.
Monkeying with photos is trivially easy. Playing with this took me all of about 5 minutes. In-hand, I think the coin is somewhere around image 2 or 3, but I usually just leave things as they come out of the camera, and image #1 is what I've saved to my computer. Images like # 4 or even #5 are sometimes showing up in auction descriptions now.
It's hard for coins to live up to pictures if folks intentionally manipulate the images in order to reel in a buyer. However, if one strives to take accurate images that either match, or are slightly worse than, the coin in-hand then it should be fairly easy for the coin to live up to the images. One simply has to learn what sellers are prone to hyperbole in their images and learn how to interpret electronic images.
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I've been disappointed several times over the years but as TomB said, after a while you get to know which dealers post pretty accurate toned coin photos most often and deal with them. eBay? - well that's another story; much more hit or miss.
- Jim
This one needs a theme song
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What Broadstruck said
Latin American Collection
There is a big problem here with the word "always." Like people, any coin can be shot in an unflattering manner. I don't think that a coin should look better in sales photograph than it does in person, but the converse is also true. It should not look worse in the photograph than it does in person. Making it look worse in the photo gives an unfair advantage to those who have seen the coin in person before an auction.
I will have to add. Beware of sellers who take pictures at an angle.
Sometimes it is required to get the color to show. Then , when you get the coin in hand it is not what you expected.
Proof coins are particularly noted for this.
Great mention Flatwoods as heavy tilting is quite common with the point-n-shoot camera users.
The only business in which more online photo doctoring takes place is dating services...
Had a friend who tried it and when he went to the bus station to meet his 'date', three women got off the bus.... and he could not identify the one he was expecting - she identified him. It did not go well...... Cheers, RickO
There aren't many scanners that show luster, or attractive image quality, but I guess no one accuses those who use scanner images of enhancement. A downside if you are hoping customers who will "buy the coin, not the holder" you need the best imaging to sell quality coins over a certain price.
Lots of good info and insights here. Especially what BryceM and TomB have to say. With this topic in mind, I have a little exercise that I do that some of you here might like to try. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has thought of it. Anyway, what I do is download or commit to memory the images of several "colorful" coins that I suspect will be on display at the next show that I attend. Then I simply compare that to the coin as it appears in hand at the show. My conclusion is that most reputable dealers are very conscientious to not post pictures of coins on their websites that are "juiced." Bottom line, unless you let your imagination run wild.....What you see is pretty much what you're going to get.
I think it is pretty easy to tell if a coin picture has been juiced like crazy. Just look at the slab or 2x2 to see if the color is correct. That's what I do anyway. Different types of tone need different angles to bring out the color but the slabs or 2x2 holder basically stays its correct color.
I do not have Photo Shop so this certainly is not Juiced.
Ken