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Author Topic: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins  (Read 61831 times)

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Offline moonmoth

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #25 on: July 18, 2006, 02:25:08 am »
Oh, I want a coin like that Salus of Pat's.  I have a page of Salus images but I don't have that one.  And now I am watching out for one ..  Nice photo, too, though I would prefer the face a bit better lit.  Has anyone tried using a ring flash?

I do get some texturing effect when taking silver coins, even with the tissue under the lid, as shown here.  (It also shows I should have wiped the lid first!  Dust accumulates overnight.)  But the paint bucket doesn't care about that.

The best reason for inserting a background of some kind is to get rid of the sharp line between the images of one side of the coin and the other, that is caused by the background illumination not being perfectly even.  But using photoshop, you could insert whatever texture you like.

Meanwhile, it strikes me that some of the comments you are making might be because I am trying with a difficult coin.  The Severus I was using has been harshly cleaned and has roughly textured surfaces.  On this coin, which has Nice surfaces, I used my setup and Pat's simple technique with auto white balance.  I followed Drumax's advice and set the exposure with all lights on.  A shorter exposure works better with silver.  (It's in my next message.)

I still has some trouble with the paint bucket filling in the shiny edges.  I tried filling with black to see exactly where it was happening, then went back and painted those areas with quick mask to protect them.  This didn't take long.

The result - using a combination of Pat, Drumax and my methods - plus a nice coin - is getting a lot better.

First two photos: showing background texture; showing a texture fill (not necessarily recommended but demonstrating the possibility).

Bill
"... A form of twisted symbolical bedsock ... the true purpose of which, as they realised at first glance, would never (alas) be revealed to mankind."

Offline moonmoth

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #26 on: July 18, 2006, 02:26:50 am »
Here's the coin photo mentioned in my last post .. I hope these come in the right order, this thread is behaving a little oddly.

Bill
"... A form of twisted symbolical bedsock ... the true purpose of which, as they realised at first glance, would never (alas) be revealed to mankind."

Offline moonmoth

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #27 on: July 18, 2006, 02:30:33 am »
And incidentally, here is a detail from my favourite Salus image .. Pat has seen this Macrinus coin from Deultum before.  This is Salus and her dad exchanging a fond look.

Bill
"... A form of twisted symbolical bedsock ... the true purpose of which, as they realised at first glance, would never (alas) be revealed to mankind."

Offline moonmoth

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #28 on: July 18, 2006, 06:27:37 am »
Ah yes, I'm getting the hang of this now.  Bronzes are dead easy, using the Pat Lawrence technique of setting custom white balance and taking JPEGs.  But I did have to adjust the levels and sharpen this up a bit to make it a realistic copy of the original.

This is a coin I find interesting. From the Kushan empire sometime after 100 CE, it is full of Hindu symbols. The trident symbolises the creator/preserver/destroyer. On the reverse is Shiva the destroyer, leaning back on his bull called Joyful. Shiva is carrying another trident, though it's obscured on this example. Yet this completely alien coin has something in common with Roman and Persian coins, and no doubt other types: the king's altar.  (And the king is carrying a club, too, like Elagabalus when he played at being an invincible priest.)  What is it about this sort of simple altar that made it such an enduring piece of religious symbolism?

Bill
"... A form of twisted symbolical bedsock ... the true purpose of which, as they realised at first glance, would never (alas) be revealed to mankind."

Offline Tiathena

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #29 on: July 18, 2006, 07:43:07 am »
   
          Salve Bill,
 
   “Ah yes, I'm getting the hang of this now
 
   Indeed, I would say so too…  I rather almost wish I could hire you to photograph my collection.  I’m horrible at it.
 
  “What is it about this sort of simple altar that made it such an enduring piece of religious symbolism?

   Despite my suspecting this is most-largely a rhetorical question …
  The elegant simplicity of at-once the device and the message, reminder and importance of Piety?
 
   Best,
   Tia
 
Facilius per partes in cognitionem totius adducimur.  ~ Seneca
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Offline moonmoth

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #30 on: July 18, 2006, 08:13:24 am »
Hi, Tiathena.

If that question sounds rhetorical, then that shows it isn't. 

Demonstrating the king's piety is a common theme, and would reassure the population.  But why should diverse religions use an altar to do so, and show this particular expression on coins? 

1.  Why is a small, simple altar so common?  Most of these altars were used to make a physical sacrifice to a deity.  Could elderly priests perhaps not bend very easily, and needed something raised to hand height?  But they had to be limber enough to kill a cow, so maybe not.  Or, was it a good idea to raise the sacrifice to a more visible height? 

2.  Why show an altar and not something else?  I'm sure that many actual religious observances were kept by paying obeisance to objects in alcoves, but the coins don't show that.  Statues had oil or wine poured on them, or their feet washed, or parts of them touched or kissed, but not on these coins.  An altar was the symbol that everyone recognised, whether in Rome, Persis or Kushan.

Just a thought.

(Rome and Persis attached: Elagabalus, Ardashir II - both using the much easier black background method.)

Bill
"... A form of twisted symbolical bedsock ... the true purpose of which, as they realised at first glance, would never (alas) be revealed to mankind."

Offline Tiathena

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #31 on: July 18, 2006, 08:36:04 am »
   
     I really need sleep so, please forgive me if I’m just being thick here; but again, that’s just why I suspected your question was largely-rhetorical – and here you even articulate (quite nicely by the way) the answer we have both offered to it.
 
  “Why show an altar and not something else? [because] … An altar was the symbol that everyone recognised, whether in Rome, Persis or Kushan.
 
  ‘The elegant simplicity of at-once the device and the message, reminder and importance of Piety.
 
  There is an awful lot to be said for universal language in politics, religion and Empire …
 
  Of course, only my thoughts too…

   Best,
   Tia
 
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Offline DruMAX

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #32 on: July 18, 2006, 09:03:45 am »

Meanwhile, it strikes me that some of the comments you are making might be because I am trying with a difficult coin.  The Severus I was using has been harshly cleaned and has roughly textured surfaces.


I was wondering if that was the case...I have a coin that was fire damaged and it was VERY hard to get a good photo because it had no luster at all and details were hard to make out. Ended up moving it well away from the light oddly and it came out rather well...I am now looking into ways to restore the luster.



Offline moonmoth

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #33 on: July 18, 2006, 11:50:49 am »
That's a good image even without the lustre, so good work!

One thing I discovered a while ago is that coins which are really low relief show up better using a flash from above.  So I tried it on this one with the white box.  It took a bit more work to remove the background - I think a slave flash illuminating the box would fix that. 

The result is maybe a bit too saturated and vivid to be an accurate representation, but it gives a much better depiction of the actual detail.

Bill
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Offline slokind

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #34 on: July 26, 2006, 12:02:28 am »
Well, if you've gotten this far, you can just go your own way.  As Numerianus and I have agreed, there is no one good piciture.  It is a question of being able to get what you want, yourself.  When you go to photograph silver, you may want to diffuse that lamp with bubble wrap or tissue (watch out for heat!), but that's just a matter of experimenting.  If you photographed that lovely smooth, sharp Claudius Libertas (I am jealous!) yourself, then bravo.  Of course, they must be sharp and informative, but there are as many ways of fulfilling that requirement as there are photographers.
Since you photographed the coin on black, the camera read that as the dark end of your scale.  If in 'Levels' you slide the extreme left, the dark end just a wee bit to right, you can restore to the coin itself a couple of spots of true dark: gives it zip, if you want that.  Of course, using brighter<--> darker slide is murder; you've seen the results here.
Disregard my monkeying with your image if you don't like it.  Pat L.

Offline moonmoth

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #35 on: July 26, 2006, 08:41:37 am »
Pat and jamesicus, very interesting!  I would suggest to Jamesicus, as well as diffusing the light, try a simple reflector on the other side to the light source.  You can even use just a sheet of white paper to good effect.  You can see my kitchen foil reflector earlier in this thread.

Looking at the "Nero right" coin image, I would think the highlights were making it look a bit one-sided.  You can use "levels" just on the highlights in Photoshop by:

1. selecting a white colour range using select/color range and clicking on the whitest part;
2. feather the selection using select/feather so that there will be no sharp edges to the affected area.  A feather radius of 5 seems to work well;
3. adjust the selection using image/adjustments/levels by moving the left-hand slider in.  You need to be careful not to over-adjust.  Don't move the slider past where information starts to appear on the histogram.    This will - if the information is present in the image - remove areas of apparent white-out and allow the coin's surface to appear again.  If the original image has areas of blow-out that can't be corrected, there will be no information on the white colour range histogram at all.  Take another photo!

On this image I would also try to correct the way one side of the image is a little too dark,  by using levels, moving in the right-hand slider, and applying a gradient.  I would also sharpen the image just a bit.  This is not a cheat - digital images are usually a bit softer than real life.  Here's my adjusted version.  I'm not saying yours is a bad photo.  It's not!  I'm just taking advantage of Photoshop to make the image more like the real thing.

p.s. Nice coin! 

p.p.s. Another hint.  Be careful not to scratch the plastic surface by scraping coins across it.  Those scratches will catch the light.

"... A form of twisted symbolical bedsock ... the true purpose of which, as they realised at first glance, would never (alas) be revealed to mankind."

Offline Heliodromus

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #36 on: July 26, 2006, 10:10:18 am »
Here's my adjusted version.

I hereby dub three "moonmothicus optimus photoshoppus"!  :)

Ben

Offline DruMAX

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #37 on: July 26, 2006, 10:22:28 am »
Thank you everyone for your great information -- and for your willingness to share your techniques. I have learned more about coin photography from this posting than any other source. I have changed my own techniques to incorporate much of what has been written here. I bought a new digital camera -- Pentax Optio W10 -- which has really excellent macro capabilities. I adapted the shadow elimination technique for white backgrounds outlined by Slokind using a turned upside-down tupperware container ..........



.......... although I am now using the simple black background technique outlined by DruMax -- I use black suede on paper squares that I purchased at a fabric shop, "Sunlight" fluorescent  light bulbs for natural coin coloration, and I did buy an inexpensive ($10) mini-tripod stand for dead still snap-off ..........




Here are two pics (Nero RIC 544 & 543 - bare headed left and right) I took using the latter set-up:



looking good, looks a lot like my set-up save the upside down container which I dont feel is needed (for me at least) :). My light is also mounted quite a bit higher so that the light is not so close and its not so bright. I use an optio as well and you are right, they have a great macro setting among other things. Since you have a stand you can set the shutter speed pretty low and you wont need near that much light...I see a lot of coins that, IMO, over light when a good digital camera set right can get incredible detail with far less light and IMO gives it a richer, less shallow, stark look.

Also, If you are like me and look to use as little PS adjustment on the coin and to capture the coin as it looks in real life, before I start adjusting levels or brightness contrast after the fact (a well shot photo shouldnt require a lot of this at all). Move your light away from the coin a bit and that will cut down on shine. With a digital camera you have a lot of shots and I like to take ob and rev shots of the coin facing in every direction. I keep my light a bit higher and to the side a bit and then I rotate the coin to get the light hitting every angle then pick and choose which angle of light looks best (light at angle, rotate coin to get light hitting from above, facing, behind, etc...)....sometimes the angle of light makes ALL the difference in detail and richness...

anyway...like people said, to each his own but you seem to be getting it...have fun.

Offline moonmoth

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #38 on: July 26, 2006, 05:26:26 pm »
I am finding that light intensity and source positioning requires constant experimentation. Gold coins are now my greatest challenge - especially ones with a lot of wear (quite frequent due to the softness of the pure gold). Aureus of Augustus, RIC206 (note banker's test mark under portrait chin) ..........
.......... This is a "first blush" image -- lots of experimentation to come!

Nice coin .. I wish I had the problem of photographing gold!

I would say this is well on the way to being good.  A quick bout of photoshopping reveals that your biggest problem is the highlights, which are washed out.  You need to diffuse the light source more, I think, and move it further away.  This will lead to problems with the exposure time.  Best of luck with the experimentation!

Bill
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Offline Istinpolin

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #39 on: August 03, 2006, 02:45:01 pm »
Hi All

With Pat's system I have had the best results and I am so happy that I have asked this, or I would have gone mental.
I have experimented with different angles of the light, grey cards and also softening the light with tissue papers and so on.
I have also tried to direct the light into the dish so it goes from beneath the coin. I also tried to rebuild a copy stand using alumin(i)um foil.

For me the double 45 (I should get a copyright for this) worked the best.
With double 45 I mean this.

The light (which should be strong) should be elevated by a 45 degree (more or less) angle from the coin/glass plate. The bulb itself should face directly down by 180 degrees (either on the floor or table/desk). The light should also hit the coin from a 45 angle. So if you look at a coin it should come from either 1030h or 1330h (1:30am). The camera should be right above the coin naturally.

Now I use the 1030h angle for coins which have the writing from left to right like for example Greek and Roman coins. I use the 1330h for coins that are written from right to left like for example Islamic coins.

You can still use this method if the scripts is circular around the edge of the coin from the right or the left depending on the script.

Best wishes,
Burak

peterpil19

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #40 on: September 26, 2006, 10:18:57 am »
Hi all,

Resizing images in Adobe Photoshop results in slight bluriness. I always wondered why my final pictures lost their original focus and I discovered 2 solutions to this which work for me:

1. In the menu Image> Image size, select the"Bicubic Sharper" option for the Resampling; or
2. After resizing, select Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen (or Unsharp Mask for custom sharpening).

I found option 2 works much better. Using the "Unsharp Mask" option, you can specify how much sharpening you would like.

Compare the below images. They were taken at different times but still illustrate the point.

Peter


Offline DruMAX

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #41 on: September 26, 2006, 10:24:14 am »
thats a big difference, thanks for the tip!

peterpil19

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #42 on: September 26, 2006, 02:35:40 pm »
Thanks Drumax!

Another tip, something I just learned a couple hours ago:

Image > Adjustment > Channel Mixer. This menu allows you to manipulate the colours in the picture more directly than Image > Adjustment > Colour balance.

I used this to remove a red reflection in a silver coin. Ideally it's best to take new photos insted, but the option is there should you require it...

Peter

Offline DruMAX

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #43 on: September 26, 2006, 03:11:42 pm »
I admit to using the channel mixer to make minor color adjustments though I do try to avoid using that as much as possible. I HAVE noticed the problem of losing serious detail when one shrinks the size, I will give this a shot for my next coin...

Offline moonmoth

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #44 on: September 26, 2006, 05:26:42 pm »
To make colour adjustments, I suggest using either a levels layer, and adjusting a particular colour; or, better in most cases, use a hue/saturation layer and desaturate one or another colour.  Other adjustments such as levels can easily add too much saturation to the colours.  On silvers, I often find I need to desaturate the yellow a bit as a second to last touch. 

The last touch is always the sharpening.  Always sharpen after changing the size.  Doing it the other way round loses lots of detail.  And always use unsharp mask; it allows for the best adjustments.  And don't over-sharpen.  Subtle adjustments are more effective in the long run.

Bill
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Offline slokind

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #45 on: September 26, 2006, 09:39:37 pm »
Experience has brought me to identically the same conclusions as moonmoth's.  I have had some pretty nasty things to deal with, such as badly faded slides that had been produced by Technicolor or slides taken on defunct or generic brands, such as Anscochrome, and I had to figure out (just to get images that would decently represent the object, for teaching) how to use everything Photoshop could afford, often in ways the Graphic Design folks never dream of.  When you photograph a denarius so that it comes up the size of a dessert plate, you need to use a bit (just a bit) of Unsharp Mask just because of the size.  Pat L.

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #46 on: April 07, 2007, 08:08:39 pm »
I do prepress work at a print company for a living, so I have a good pointer on sharpening images that many of you may not know. Instead of using unsharp mask, you should convert the image to LAB color. Instead of R,G, & B channels, there will be L, A,  & B. The L channel is the lightness/darkness. The A and B involve the colors. Now, select the A and B channels and apply a little bit of gausian blur to "smooth out" the color from any JPEG compression artifacts. Then, sharpen the L channel. You can sharpen the L channel quite a bit without making the image looks like its been over-sharpened. It really produces superior results with a bit of experimentation. Then, you can convert it back to RGB mode without any color shifting. LAB mode is the most powerful color space for any kind of color-correction or sharpening.

Once you get a feel for the blur and sharpen settings that work well for the photos you take, you can even record the whole shebang as an action, so that you can process entire batches at once. I use actions all the time at work. An example you might use is if you want to make all of your coin images the exact same size. Open the Actions pallette, have a coin image handy, and click the little paper-with-turned-corner on the bottom of the pallette. That's for "create new action". Name it whatever you want, then it will automatically be in record mode (if not, click the red circle). At this point, you can change the image size to whatever your standard is (or any other things you'd like to automate). when you're finished, click the gray square to stop recording. Then, when you have an image open, all you have to do is go to the Actions pallette, select the action you created, and press the green triangle. It will do all your stuff for you automatically. Even better, go to File>Automate>Batch and you can select a whole folder full of images and have it run the action on all of them while you sit back and sip your coffee. It's a real time-saver!

As for taking an odd color cast off of silver without affecting the color of the rest of the coin, I'd use an adjustment layer (curves) in combination with a layer mask. You can use the layer mask to control which part of the image is affected by the adjustment layer...and to what degree. The best thing about adjustment layers is that if you save the image as a TIFF or PSD, the adjustments you make are completely reversable or tweakable at any time in the future.

In the layers pallette, click on the little half-black, half-white circle at the bottom. That's for creating the adjustment layer. It'll make a menu pop up with the choices of what kind of adjustmest layer you want to make (curves, levels, etc.) once you create it, do your settings and press OK. You don't have to make it perfect at first, because you can go back and tweak it any time you like. You'll notice that there is a white box in the layers pallette in the adjustment layer. That is the layer mask. If you click on it, you can use things like the paintbrush or the gradient tool to determine what parts of the image are affected by the adjustment layer. Anything painted black will be unaffected, anything white will be fully affected. Shades of gray make things partially affected. This is very useful...and completely reversable/editable at any time. You can save as a TIFF or PSD and go back and tweak your adjustments weeks later if you feel like it. Or, you can create multiple adjustment layers and turn them on or off to compare them and see which one you prefer.

If you want to avoid that, and simply want to adjust one part of the image by selecting it and doing a quick-and-dirty adjustment, the best way to do it so that the line between the adjusted and non-adjusted part is not noticeable is to make the selection (with any of the selection tools, such as the lasso...or painting it in quick-mask mode), then going into quick-mask mode (if you are not already there) and using gaussian blur to "feather" the selection area. This gives you an excellent amount of control with the feathering. A lot of people don't realize that the "painted" areas in quick-mask mode can have filters applied to them. You can do some very nice effects this way, such as creating vignettes with edges that look like rippled glass. Try it out...it's fun.


bruce61813

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #47 on: April 10, 2007, 10:55:10 am »
TRPOT, if you have time, it might be instructive if you could put together an example, from the 'raw' picture to final in 4 or 5 steps.  Your information has given me something to experiment with!

thank you!

Bruce

TRPOT

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #48 on: April 10, 2007, 09:01:32 pm »
Hi all,

Resizing images in Adobe Photoshop results in slight bluriness. I always wondered why my final pictures lost their original focus and I discovered 2 solutions to this which work for me:

1. In the menu Image> Image size, select the"Bicubic Sharper" option for the Resampling; or
2. After resizing, select Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen (or Unsharp Mask for custom sharpening).

I found option 2 works much better. Using the "Unsharp Mask" option, you can specify how much sharpening you would like.

Compare the below images. They were taken at different times but still illustrate the point.

Peter



Instead of going through all that fuss and bother, just uncheck "Resample Image" when you resize an image. If you are making an image smaller, and you tell it to resample the image, it will still cram as many pixels-per-inch as before. This means it will have to throw pixels away. In other words, a 300ppi image at 1"x1" will have 300 pixels. Resample it to 1/2" square, and there's only room for 150 pixels...half of the original information/detail will be lost forever. If you uncheck "resample image", it will not throw any pixels away, it will just make them smaller.

TRPOT

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Re: Your advice needed for cutting and cropping coins
« Reply #49 on: April 10, 2007, 09:12:08 pm »
Quote from: bruce61813 on April 10, 2007, 10:55:10 am
TRPOT, if you have time, it might be instructive if you could put together an example, from the 'raw' picture to final in 4 or 5 steps.  Your information has given me something to experiment with!

thank you!

Bruce

Maybe I'll have time one day, but in the meantime, there's a gazillion Photoshop tutorials online if you google them. You can get excellent step-by-step instructions for all of the stuff I mentioned and more.

Come to think of it, have you ever just gone into the Photoshop Help menu? There's a lot of good stuff in there that will teach you how to do anything if you know what you want to do.

I tend to get a bit lazy with my images because I only have a flatbed scanner. My digital camera is no good for close-ups. As you've seen, a scanner will make the high points of a coin look sharp and the low points look blurry...no good for high-relief coins. Plus, since I do this stuff all day at work, it's about the last thing I want to do when I get home! I like my coin collection for relaxation....and Photoshop doesn't relax me any longer. LOL

One thing about PS is that there's so many different methods one can use to achieve the same results. Taking a color cast off of a coin can be done with Curves, Hue/Saturation, Levels, Channel Mixer, etc etc etc it all depends on what you are most comfortable with. I personally use Curves for almost everything when it comes to color correction because it can pretty much do it all.

 

All coins are guaranteed for eternity