How Can I Improve My Coin Photography

Should I move the location of my lights?

In the last three sets of pictures, they were at 4 and 10.

That's Better! Not as yellow.

I'm surprised at the quality of the details in these pics. I was not expecting good sharpness in the closeup, but it's there. That said, the biggest problem I see is the images seem to be generally over-exposed. Do you have any control over exposure with the phone camera app? What you're looking for is to keep any highlights from over-exposing, and to do this you need to make a faster shutter speed, a smaller aperture (larger f-number), smaller ISO, etc. You may try even more diffusion to help with this. Move the tissue farther from the light (make a bigger ball) and you will increase your diffusion level. Keeping it really close to the light minimizes the effective diffusion...Ray

I adjusted the tissue paper, so that it's farther from the lights.

Here is the difference between HDR and Regular pictures, using the Apple Camera App.

I think I will use HDR from now on, for coin photography. The lighting seems a lot less harsh.

These are Unedited pictures (Well, I cropped them slightly).

This is my second set of HDR Pictures.

Thanks Ray,

I'll admit, I don't have any experience with changing the Levels. Here are the options available in GIMP.

You realize this is simply ludicrous from a phone camera, don't you?

Toning is going to be especially difficult in detail imaging due to the inherent lighting compromises. No matter - toning isn't why you're creating those. Color is best illuminated axially, but I don't know if you're getting sufficient relief from the coin for an axial setup.

I would think any camera (phone, P&S, MILC, DSLR, whatever) can take advantage of lens stacking, and the final result will be defined more by the quality of the objective lens (10x loupe in this case) than the camera.