Lighting Toned, Proof-Like Coins...

You're making me want to experiment with axial again.

I've never been good at getting proofs to show deep mirrors. SD recommends ringlights but even then I usually end up with too much surface finish showing and not enough mirror. This is the case with the smile directors as well. They tend to mimic axial lighting but without the central brightness. In reality they are like a section of a ringlight that is optimized in diameter to be just outside the direct reflection diameter of the coin. So while not axial, they are as close as you can get without glare.

I suppose part of the reason I've never done a lot with proofs is that I don't own many. However, I did just pick up this 1950 Proof Nickel that has great mirrors, so I figured it would be a good subject to show how the smileys do with proofs. No toning, just original surfaces.

I think that was the point, right? You were having issues with not showing chrome-like glare with anything other than axial lighting and asked what the smile directors did on a brilliant proof.

Sometime I'll set up the ringlight as SD suggests to see the result.

That's fairly normal. Obverse and Reverse typically have different depths in their fields and heights of their devices, at least for classic coins. Most of my pictures are of Lincoln Cents, which are very difficult to capture on obverse, but whatever I do on the obverse tends to work on the reverse. I've often attributed that to the "face effect", ie we're far more sensitive to the way faces look than most anything else. It takes precise lighting positions and subtle variation in height and angle to get the shadows just right on Lincoln's face, but pretty much anything goes on the wheat stalks and lettering. This is another of my complaints about axial lighting, ie true axial lighting is a one-size-fits-all situation. Mixing in some other lighting elements should help this.

Here's my first real result with smile-based technology.

(higher resolutions)

I keep going back and forth whether I like the overall look of this or the axial-spot hybrid approach better. This is definitely more reproducible and less effort in post, and doesn't introduce the extra noise and blur from the axial setup.

I definitely like it better than the pure axial approach, although I'll probably sometimes use axial lighting as a "extra" picture for some coins like this. Here's my take on the smile director concept:


Smile Director on Lego Stand by CaptainFwiffo, on Flickr


Smile Director in Use by CaptainFwiffo, on Flickr


Smile Director (closeup) by CaptainFwiffo, on Flickr

I don't have to tape anything to the dang lights and it's much easier to line up. I can also adjust the distance of each light if I want to tune the brightness. It's easy to adjust the height of the stand in a number of set positions if I want to play with the height of the lighting. I've made a couple of different disks with different width rings, so I can experiment with that too.

For the obverse of this coin, only having lights at 10:30 and 1:30 wasn't working out because too much of the top rim was in shadow, and there is color and texture I want to make visible there. So I had another smile fired up at 4:30 but backed off a bit. That way I can highlight that area but it's not as bright so the shadows and luster don't get washed out.

I was going to ask how much of a sweep your smile directors use. I have some little pieces of black card stock I use to mask parts of it where necessary. I left them wide open for this coin, but it's an exception.

What's the approximate inner/outer radius of your smiles? I used a roll of Ikes as a template for making the tube in the center (about 40mm diameter), and then the outer diameter is about 10mm bigger. I have another disc with the same inner diameter but with a 5mm ring. The wider ring lets light climb further up the rims on the concave obverse, but I might try the narrower one on the flatter reverse.

I'll have to make different ones for much larger coins; even nickels might be a close call.