First Pictures With The New Jansjo Lamps (Allot Of Pictures)

Ray, I've sent you Bryan's original. I suspect there might be a little light bleed from the monitor; we'll await Bryan's input as far as that goes.

One theory that sticks in my mind is these huge pixel counts are resolving such detail that the microscopic imperfections in the surfaces are actually able to reflect slightly different parts of the spectrum back to the lens. If this were the case, though, you should be seeing it as well with your T2i.

BTW, my lens comparison will have to wait a few days, because someone was ditzy enough not to consider that the Schneider was a Leica M39 thread, and didn't order an M42 adapter.

Bryan...Got your images. I'm heading out for the rest of the day so will take a look at them for processing the jpgs later tonight. I asked for the bigger apertures for sharpness debugging. For Dollars, f8 should be your target aperture. The f4 and f2.8 shots were to see if you were having focus, DOF, diffraction problems, not as a suggested aperture for taking photos.

SuperDave...Agreed on the fine detail causing the issue. This is the "local contrast" I've been referring to. It is down to the grain structure of the metals almost. Also, you may not know it but I included a M39-M42 "helicoil" type adapter with the 75ARD1. It makes the lens "look" like an M42 but it's M39. You should be able to remove it and use it on other M39's...Ray

the monitor is about 18 inches off the top of the desk and about 36 inches from where the coin is but I don't know if it could be throwing light on it or not to be honest

yeah I will set everything up and take another picture and since I know I can now I will send the raw picture. I will set the camera up like I had it at first (which is the settings you told me was the sweet spot)

Edit: Dave I sent you a raw format picture, I stood a book up between the coin and the monitor. I guess I may need to mention I have a huge picture window about 4 feet away from where I am sitting the coin to take the photos which may be what you are seeing

OK, I'm back and checked out the original image 1. Bryan, you are definitely over-exposing, and your camera is compressing dynamic range a bit because of it. In ViewNX2 I had to adjust brightness down significantly (-22), until I started to see lost shadows around coin highlights. I compensated with some gamma correction (Nikon calls it "shadow protection" in ViewNX2). I saw some lost sharpness on 4x downconversion so added a sharpness "1" to compensate. The result is not as good as SuperDave was able to do with RAW processing, but it was simpler and you don't need to learn GIMP...Ray

Here's the same workflow with no sharpening...Ray

I prefer spot or partial metering with aperture priority mode. Most of your exposure problems will be gone, though you will still need to do some levels adjustment, just fewer and they'll be more effective...Ray