How Does PCGS Take Their Trueview Photos (Regular Strikes)?

They use multiple lights, probably halogens. Their pictures are consistently red-shifted - and they have the added benefit that they are shooting raw coins not coins behind plastic.

The saturation also seems to be consistently boosted in post processing for toned coins.

In effect, TrueView images seem to represent what a coin would look like on its absolute best day and in its absolute best light. In my experience, they are VERY far away from "True" for anything but blast white silver coins.

To me this is a misleading and unsound practice from a business standpoint.

Thank you for posting this article! I am actually familiar with it and I find it, devoid of numbers and specifics, quite difficult to follow and surprising at times. Just to give some examples:




Just a few words after they talk about 2.5 seconds shutter speeds (which is huge).
Moreover how can sharpness improve by small apertures? Afaik it's kind of the opposites: they would create artefacts and decrease sharpness (as they are usually far away from a lens sweet spot). On the contrary, given the flatness of the subject one would expect they to stay at the lens sweet spot (usually mid/low apertures).
Also how is camera shakes even an issue as none would shoot bare-hand?

Thank you Coinfrog. I kind of get what you mean. Perhaps it would be better if they were more consistent with how they take these photos and also openly document it. Something like saying given conditions x, y, z .. the coin looks like this..

I wish I could take those beauty shots too though...

In my opinion Trueview is not true, they change the contrast, saturation etc, maybe to hide surface defects. The coins do not look in hand like their photos. I wonder if PCGS photographers were trained by ebay sellers who photoshop their coin pics LOL.

Coins look very different depending on the angle of the lighting. The two photos posted by @brg5658 are good examples of the use of axial (or pseudo-axial) light to bring out the deep toning colors in the field, versus more traditional diffused lighting from more of an angle versus the coin. If you hold the coin such that light reflects directly from the source to your eyes, you'll see that deep color come out. Axial lighting mimics this effect. And while PCGS swears they don't use axial, and I believe them, it does not take true axial lighting to bring out that effect. What non-coin photogs call this is "direct" reflection, so that's probably a better term to use. The color of the coin can change dramatically when lit with direct reflection versus the other type, "diffuse" reflection, as seen in @brg5658's second image.

Unfortunately, PCGS seems to go a bit beyond this and significantly juices their images with postprocessing. I'm not against postprocessing as long as it makes the image look more like the coin, but I've seen many True Views that are way too red, and way too saturated, and don't look like the coin under any conceivable lighting situation. I've also seen coins that look more brilliant and colorful than the True View, so it all comes down to lighting the coin and processing the photo to look like the coin.

Edited to add: for folks interested in the theory of photographic lighting, going way beyond the priniciples shared in most books, I recommend "Light Science and Magic". I have the 3rd edition but it's in its 6th edition. Here's a link to both:

3rd: https://www.amazon.com/Light-Scienc...p/0240808193

6th: https://www.amazon.com/Light-Scienc...p/0367860279

Further edit: if you don't want to buy the book, you can look online for references to the "Family of Angles", which is a big part of lighting science and most germane to what I'm talking about above.

Yes, IMO it would be better if they could keep their lighting style, but reduce the post-process juicing. It seems the new staff may be trying to do this, but based on some old/new TV images published recently, they still have work to do. The new ones have too low contrast, and they changed the lighting to reduce the direct/axial content, so the whole character of the image is degraded.