My first coin pics with a digital camera...

[berylcoin-migration]

A few weeks ago while my brother was visiting we decided to try shooting a few quick pics of my coins with his new camera (Fuji Finepix??). We had neither a tripod nor a decent light, and ended up having the coin, light, and camera each held freehand. Here are the results and some scans for comparison.

 

This is the first pic we shot. The white balance was off but otherwise a decent image. Beginners' luck?

Scan of same coin:

 

This is our second image--apparently it was beginners' luck.

 

A second try on the same coin:

A scan for comparison:

 

Even with these "less than perfect" results it's easy to see the possibility of images far superior to those I can get from a scanner.

 

BC

[DonHeath]

I like the first pic. Quite nice.

 

 

[crito]

I really like my new $500 digital camera, but it can't match my $100 scanner for extreme closeups. I'm going to need a microscope and lens adaptor now too. About 10X the cost for the same level of detail

 

Done on my Visoneer 8900 at 1200 dpi.

 

 

[nwcs]

Good tries! Since you said that first one with the camera was not white balanced, I took the liberty of balancing it for you.

 

Neil

[berylcoin-migration]

Thanks for the white-balance, but I'd already butchered the color balace in PhotoDeluxe. To correctly white-balance do you need the raw pic?

 

BC

[nwcs]

Not necessarily. Color correction is one of those areas where you do need to see what it should look like first and every monitor displays things a bit differently and every human eye perceives color slightly (or more) differently. However, there are certain things you can take advantage of. For example, if a color is supposed to be a shade of gray, it almost doesn't matter what was done to the pic so long as the distortion is applied universally. So for your image, it wasn't hard. But if you had done touch ups in certain parts of the image and lost information in a brightness/contrast operation, the color correction would help but still be off.