Having Difficulty With Silver Coins - Newbie :/

Proof, proof-like and high grade MS coins have to be dealt with differently.
Ideally you should use axial lighting but most people don't have the setup to do that.
Next best thing is to use diffused lighting.
Surf it up.

just a feeble thought here,, when I try to take a shot of the coin and slab..I am really way out of perspective of getting a good shot "of the coin"...many lenses are for perfecting the whole coin or of macro pinpoint shots..In general I try to get a closer shot of the whole silver dollar in this case, as many of us do,, to get better detail of the coin alone...One can take a shot of the whole coin and slab...But real detail of the coin will not be as good ..It is good enough to post online like for ebay though..
The lenses focal distance alone is quite amazing, when one thinks of just taking a photo,,,,,getting the coin holder and then another the coin alone can be quite different distances from the lens focal planes... the good thing is there is more than one plane for a lens given its distance to the camera's sensor using adapters and what not..,, however these guys can point you into the best direction to chose what you want/or how you need to proceed to what your trying to do The general Idea I am conveying is, many a lens is a normal lens with Macro ability....all in one lens,, "HOWEVER" using bellows or extension rings, the normal lens can take on new abilities..a lens that can only take distance shots can be made to take close up shots...AS noted silver can be a tuff shot to take.. Gene

Welcome to Coin Community, Amanda. Pleasing to see a new member's first posts here in the Photography Forum.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest your images aren't as bad as you think right now, and will only need a little tweaking to get the last few percentage points of quality. One important question which hasn't been asked, though, is what lens you're using....

Go to two lights rather than three, and raise the ISO to 400 (even 800 will be OK with a T3i) so you have more latitude with exposures because the "sweet spot" exposure will be faster. I personally prefer Spot metering to Center-weighted so the corners have no effect on the metering, but Ray's better at this than me so you should probably listen to him.

What you're getting in return for the "blowouts" is detail and contrast, and the moment you start diffusing the light those will suffer. There is a nice compromise with equipment of this quality, though, and the equivalent of maybe one layer of toilet tissue in diffusion will probably get you there. And you can always tweak a little in post.

But, lens first.

When displaying here, crop to just the coin and save the .jpg in lower Quality if you're going to use the CCF Uploader - that will allow you to post coin-only images of 800px or better (the "minimum" we like to shoot for). You could also host externally at Photobucket or similar. We don't like imgur because it's not filtered and we have young members here.

For color, you will want to adjust your white balance. It looks like you have a couple different color temperatures for the light sources illuminating your coin; probably the background lights in the room are a different color from the lights that are lighting it directly. Using lights that are all the same color will help (try turning off the room lights and closing the blinds).

For brightness, you can probably increase the exposure by at least a full stop. Either drop the shutter speed to something like 1/15 or open the aperture to f/5.6 or so while holding the other settings the same. You may have to go into full manual mode to get the exposure just right; shiny coins can foil auto-exposure settings. You could also increase the exposure in whatever program you use to process/edit your photos after you take them.

I'm not sure that lower pic is a good reference. It is WAY overexposed. Your image is a bit overexposed but still has something to work with.

It looks like you need to move your lights around a bit to get best directional shadowing. I can see that you have a light coming from around 6:00, one from around 2:00, and maybe one from 10:00. It's almost never a good idea to have main lighting from anywhere between 4:00 and 8:00. I'd suggest simply turning off the light from 6:00 and see how the image turns out.