Help! ... How Can I Improve?

Thanks Ray, i' m also going to work in parallel and try creating smile directors directly on the lights, I think all I need to do is just cut a round piece of vellum and round piece of cardboard, cut out a smile on the cardboard, unscrew the head of the janjso and place those two layers in ... are those all the layers required? Have I missed anything? Oh and how wide should the smile be in the cardboard?

Good tip! Thanks Ray, I'll try that (probably in the next couple of days) in the meantime I've played around with the smile directors on the lamps themselves, I think they're too curved and possibly too thick? thoughts so far?

OK so the good news is that I got the copy stand and created a large diffuser (2x3 A4 pages of vellum) ... the bad news is that I still think that for some reason His Majesty George the VI still hates me: I think it's a matter of positioning the lamps better .. what are your thoughts?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ym...?usp=sharing

PS: Oh and the smile directors are a complete failure for me it seems, don't even ask :(

The image does look very good. What are you unhappy with? I am not fond of the very close crop, as I prefer a bit of space around the coin. The highlights are much better than before. Are you using the Heritage-style lighting technique?

Thanks guys! Your encouragement means the world for me!

I agree the highlights look better now, and you're correct again, I'm using something similar to Heritage's style (basically created a large diffusor of 2x3 A4 vellum pages and stuck on a light cardboard frame .. I'm however experimenting with 2 lights instead of 1, the really weird thing is that when I got my lights as close as possible to the body of the camera it wasn't as good as when I put it far, again inspired by Heritage's setup.

I guess the reason I'm still not 100% happy is that the face seems a bit flat to me .. but then I realized I think I'm comparing this design to Ray's beyond-amazing photos of his Lincoln cents and how they look almost 3D deep ... so perhaps it's the coin itself? I'll try my setup with a cent also so I can compare apples to apples.

OK here's a modern cent, taken with both lenses I have, I think I like the Sigma more though I can't quite explain why - needless to say it's nowhere near the beauties that Ray produces!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sm...?usp=sharing

Thanks Ray! Any ideas on what can I do to improve? I still think it's too flat and also a bit of darkness at the top (or is that ok?)

I would probably do some levels adjustments but it looks pretty good already, and I don't have the coin to know if it matches the look well enough.

I am not sure about the WB issue. You say it was darker, but that doesn't have much to do with WB. Do you mean you needed to adjust levels? WB adjusts the color.