Background Color Matters.

Pentax boasts some of the best color correction in the business - your rig shouldn't have totally freaked out that way over a dark blue background. Were you by some chance using a Custom white balance setting, or a preset other than Auto? Retry the blue-background shoot on Auto.

Looks to me like a pretty common saturation issue.

Still a little curious as to why the WB was so far off using that preset - after all, the lamps were tungsten - but we'll chalk it up to a glitch and move on.

The background will matter to him if his camera is interpreting the white balance incorrectly.

I took that third photo, and I opened it up in Lightroom (photo editing). The only thing I did was hit the 'auto white-balance' setting.
This is what happened:


Just my 2 cents, but it would be beneficial to do the majority of the adjusting on the camera. Unless able to shoot RAW images, you're
going to lose image quality if you start post-processing every image. It'll get noisy!

Yeah, the camera is a bit confused. Lol. I wonder if there's an option to set your own custom white balance on his camera?

Huh? I think you read my post wrong. I am not interested in artistically pleasing that's why I don't give a toss about the background when I photograph a coin! So I repeat IMHO the background of a coin, when photographing, is unimportant, and I go further and say its an unnecessary distraction an waste of time when setting up the shot properly.

I certainly don't want the colors to be approximate; I want them to be exact!! Like you I am dealing with minute detail and coin features that separate out different varieties. So high resolution (I now use a camera without an anti-aliasing filter), accurate lighting, and sharpness are extremely important.


Then there is the question of minimal editing....I recall that I had huge problems with editing photos until I attended that ANA summer seminar last year and participated in the seminar on how to photograph coins. I would often think as you have stated (re minimal editing) but in fact I did more editing than I do now.

I now spend more time setting up the shots and as little time as possible editing. So I suspect your comment, like my previous attitude, comes from a lack of knowledge.

The only editing I do is as follows( assuming I am happy with the photograph.

• Step 1: Using the elliptical Marque(standard cropping tool)...I select the coin


• Step 2: I then invert the selection ( so that only the background is selected)


• Step 3 I hit delete removing all the background and leaving only the coin

That's usually the end of my editing. As I have already set a default white background the coin appears to be on white. However you can pick any background color you like. the reason I use a white background is so that when the picture is published the coin is all that is seen on the page. For ebay of course one would pick other colors to make the coin stand out

As others have pointed out White balance is really important. Too important to rely on the camera's pre-set options. So I use custom white balance ie: I set the white balance using standard 18% grey cards purchased from a camera shop.