Coin Images & Photoshop - Scans

I'll be happy to offer opinion later when I'm at my PC, but wish to make one quick point: the final judge will be yourself, because you're the best judge of how close the picture is to the coin in your hand. Anything you do in postprocessing to achieve that goal is fine.

Comments on color, and to an extent contrast, have to be considered carefully. Monitors differ. Color settings aren't universal, and calibration quality varies. The reader may not quite be seeing the same coin as you.

Did you adjust your monitor's color space? That adjustment makes the mapping from the colors in the .jpg to the screen as accurate as possible. Otherwise all of the adjustments you make may be making things WORSE!

Once the monitor is properly calibrated, as Dave says, adjust the image to match what your eye sees. He's also right that somebody else's monitor may not be calibrated and so regardless of what you do... but that's not something you can fix. The goal is to make YOUR image match YOUR coin on YOUR equipment.

If you are really fanatical, then buy a color target. This is an example: http://www.ebay.com/itm/DGK-Color-T...191462167183 - there are many others out there, bigger, smaller, cheaper, more accurate (expensive), etc.

Basically what that is, is a card with a number of blocks of known colors and the software to map those to what is found in the image file. So the software computes the unique transformation equation from your image source (the jpg file) to what it should look like.