Lighting Advice

You're getting nice even light on the coin, but you're right about the difference in wattage between the sides and overhead. If you lengthen the exposure to get a little more brightness, the overhead light will overpower the sides and wash the coin out. It's still a nice shot, though. I'd go one of two ways here, depending on the capabilities of your camera. First, I'd try losing the overhead light entirely, and increase the exposure/open the aperture/increase ISO to compensate. You've a total of almost 100w equivalent in CFL, which ought to be enough for a good exposure. Second, I'd try brightening the existing pic in software to see if it's good enough to begin with.

I see something with this coin I've noted in CFL's before - it looks like the left-hand light is of a different color temperature than the right. Even with two identical bulbs, I've seen that variation in color temperature. It's incredibly frustrating, because you really can't correct for it with white balance settings. That, I think, is the reason why the left looks dimmer than the right, because the brightness of the edges which face the lights are similar. My guess is, you're properly corrected for the right-hand and overhead lights, and the left-hand light is throwing you off. Can the setup be tweaked to use only the overhead and right lights? That would be another thing to try.

I appreciate your kind words. If you look more closely at what I've been saying, you'll realize that I'm in my own learning process, and sharing it as I go. People have pointed out my mistakes to me more than once.

What do you have for post-processing software? If you don't feel like spending hundreds of dollars on Photoshop, the Gimp is free and more than powerful enough to help you make any corrections your images might need.