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Shoutout to Coinstudio.ai
tradedollarnut
Posts: 20,806 ✭✭✭✭✭
tradedollarnut
Posts: 20,806 ✭✭✭✭✭
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Looks great. Same on I used for my infamous "AU50" Seated Quarter
Latin American Collection
Their 1892 25C PCGS AU58+ example looks pretty darn good...except LIBERTY is gibberish and TRUST is misspelled.
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More digital coin Frankensteins. Denticles wrong. Lettering wrong. "LIBERTY" wrong.
Looks nice to the Instagram crowd, I guess...
Superb collections are built more by omission than by addition.
Like any tool it is as good as the info given to it. From what I have seen so far it has some deficiencies, dark areas on photos seem to be one of those. Like others I've seen these look great at a glance, if you study them closely then the issues are somewhat obvious. But for those like myself who are somewhat photo challenged this is a useful tool.
My Collection of Old Holders
Never a slave to one plastic brand will I ever be.
They look nice from far away. But if you look at the coin, there are bizarre errors in the lettering and fields.
The 1909 s has two Ts in UNITED. And LIBERTY looks like it’s spelled “library”.
The 1909 proof has “UniteB”
The 1909 in MS has ghost-clashing on the cheek that’s probably not on the coin (maybe it is?)
Presumably they will get better in time.
Looks like a "Shutout for Coinstudio.ai" to me.
Ah - but I don’t care about the coin at all. It’s a holder collection
They are killer holder pictures.
I’m concerned about the abuse potential especially if you’re on a smartphone.
Hi! Will from Coinstudio here. Appreciate the shoutout.
I used to post here many years ago with the handle GoldenEyeNumismatics. Coinstudio has been a fun project I’ve been working on for a couple months. I’m still not sure if it’s a side project or an actual business.
I wanted to tackle coin photography because I used to buy and sell coins a lot on eBay (handle was yankeecoin). Most of my success there was because I got really good at taking coin pictures. I invested in cameras, lenses, lighting, stands, and software…. and then invested many hours of practice. With AI, it’s now much easier to bridge that equipment/skill gap.
Many folks are skeptical of using AI for coin photography. You are all correct in your doubts. AI can hallucinate details, embellish, lie, etc.
It’s also gotten to be quite capable, and getting better astoundingly fast.
Whether or not people use my tool, people will use AI to edit their coin pictures. So I’d rather they use a tool that’s purpose-built for coins and that has decent guardrailing built in. Instead of just throwing it into ChatGPT or Midjourney.
If any of you are curious about how Coinstudio works, I’m an open book. Ask away! Most of it is relatively simple… a few parts get much more complicated.
There's "editing coin pictures" and then, there's "editing coin pictures". Editing to adjust brightness or white balance or whatever to make the image appear on the screen more like it does in hand is not anything at all like editing it such that actual design elements are modified.
JMO, YMMV
In the case of AI, this does not apply. it's non deterministic... In most cases it's not meant to give back precision just estimates albeit very sophisticated. IMHO not a good use case rendering hyper specific aspects of coins which are always best seem in person by experts.
It'll get you in the stadium but never in the right seat. Its not the strength of the tech. My experience. Anyone who says different is likely trying to sell you something.
That’s a very broad brush assessing an advancing technology at a point in time. In some things it’ll get you exactly to the right seat and in other things, nowhere close. The pace of change is rapid, so the answer to the question today will be very different than the answer tomorrow.
My company is working with it now around improving security by identifying patterns, the absence of established patterns, and then the probability weighted scenarios that an adverse event is occurring to then take action before it occurs. These are all probabilities, but the technologies advanced to the point where you can say with 98+ percent confidence interval that’s something bad is about to happen, before it’s happened and then take action to prevent it. A year ago, the technology had not advanced to the point where this was likely possible, or it was such a great cost that it couldn’t be adopted at scale.
Point is, what seems to be a problem today will likely not be a problem in the future and experimentation is required for innovation.
Latin American Collection
Can I get you a tin foil hat to go.
Dude what the heck, all I said is this is a tool that can be useful for some and you throw out all this nonsense. I'm not selling anything nor am I buying anything.
My Collection of Old Holders
Never a slave to one plastic brand will I ever be.
I apologize to @coinbuf , his site is free and for hobbyists. I wasn't thinking of him as the seller in this scenario but I'm talking about the Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta's of the world.
The tech is impressive, I rely on it daily.. it was more about rendering specific images, people were observing denticles or specific coin features being off, coinbuf was clear on this himself.. there are incredibly fit use cases for LLM/API as you've cited. Maybe we'll get a hyper specific trained model which can guarantee image precision.
I do have one question, well two actually. The site requires multiple photos uploaded to create the new photo, what happens to those uploaded photos? Do they stay on the site and do they become the property of Coinstudio to do with as you wish? And the follow-on question is what about the photo the software creates; does that also become the property of Coinstudio?
My Collection of Old Holders
Never a slave to one plastic brand will I ever be.
I am on the fence with the photos as they present themselves today. I can see why TDN enjoys them for his own specific purposes. And why others here enjoy them. I can also easily understand how the photos of the coins themselves cannot be used for any serious numismatic research or accurate reliance at least at this moment in time, maybe someday and maybe not. But I cannot take coin photos that look good or are good for coin inspection so I am totally dependent on PCGS, NGC & CACG for their photography as well as the noted photographers spread out through the industry/hobby. But everything helps unless it doesn't. I kind of sound like Yogi right about now.
@coinbuf Apologies for the slow reply... I lost track of this thread.
In technical terms, image storage is in GCP (Google). The images also get submitted to the OpenAI APIs for image generation and so they exist in their ecosystem as well.
In terms of who owns the image, honest answer is that I don't know. This has been a fun project and no circumstance has come up that has made me need to think critically about who actually owns the image. I sometimes post outputs and before/afters on Instagram, but always with the permission of the person who submitted it. It's all been very friendly and most of the usage within the product has been free/unpaid.
Looks like a great start @coinstudio ! Everyone is right that from a distance it looks very nice, so it will be great to see how far it goes.
Would be great to be able to do some high-res photos like TrueView:
Regarding hallucinations, I made the following today for another thread and the word DEMONSTRATION is a bit mangled:
@Zoins right now, I think of it as a sort of high-fidelity impressionism. I think it captures the "look" of a coin quite well. But if you scrutinize it closely, you'll often find a number of AI artifacts.
Generally, the higher resolution the submitted images are, the fewer of those artifacts you'll encounter.
There should be no need for an AI algorithm to touch the image of the coin itself if the goal is to do compositing with a synthesized slab image. Use AI or classical computational geometry techniques to localize the coin in the original and then copy it back into the finished image in the right place at the right size.
Keeper of the VAM Catalog • Professional Coin Imaging • Prime Number Set • World Coins in Early America • British Trade Dollars • Variety Attribution
I'm not trying to give you a hard time here, but your website says:
"This is a product built by collectors who understand the importance of honestly representing each piece."
If there are AI artifacts in the created image, is that really an honest representation?
I downloaded this junk coin today and took 5 photos from N, S, E, W and straight on both obverse and reverse. I added them to the photo stations and generated AI photos. Absolutely, fantastic results. Now, I will add, it was a most difficult process, with many errors occurring(probably my fault) mostly to the addition of the obverse to reverse photos. Each time I would get them uploaded and it would not add the reverse. It would generate the obverse, but then not the reverse even though it showed to be completed. So finally, I tried the do not complete obverse but still would not complete the reverse, but when I pull up from completion a reverse photo appears but I have to copy it in order to save it.
As said, love the result, but I'll wait until a tutorial appears to utilize further.
Below are my obv/rev photo and the gorgeous results of the software.
Jim
My Photos:
Coinstudio's Photos:
When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest....Abraham Lincoln
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.....Mark Twain
I try. It's not perfect, but I try, and as AI improves it will get better over time.
Some examples of the types of artifacts that show up.
thanks for giving it a try @jesbroken! Feedback noted
One thing I've considered adding is some sort of accuracy/honesty meter... similar to like/dislike on social media, users could vote on the Feed if they feel the image is an accurate representation of it's source/input pictures or not.
I think it would be really cool to get that feedback, but I also don't know if there's enough activity in/around the product yet to accumulate a lot of signal. Right now on any given week there are about 50 users.
Trouble with the meter would be who could legitimately use it. Only people who actually see the coin inhand would be able to truthfully opine as to its accuracy. That would only be(most of the time) the user of the software who posted it's usage to begin with.
How about a tutorial for us less capable users? Please.
JMO
When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest....Abraham Lincoln
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.....Mark Twain
I haven't used the site and haven't visited it, but it seems to me that folks could take multiple images of a coin in a slab and then black out the coin and submit the images so that what they get instead is a good image of the slab. Yes, I know that sounds weird, but folks like @tradedollarnut could get really good shots of slab versions in this way and then simply photoshop images of the coin within the slab. Again, I realize this is a niche demand but one where the coin would not get distorted.
In honor of the memory of Cpl. Michael E. Thompson
Heck, the OP pics are nicer than TrueViews!
Official PCGS account of:
www.TallahasseeCoinClub.com