How To Make These Shots Better?

Straight off drop the F stop down to somewhere between 8 and 16. Your pictures are probably suffering from diffraction( making them look blurry)

I would try opening up the aperture as much as you can get away with. At macro distances, f/22 is going to needlessly add a lot of softness due to diffraction. I shoot my coins at f/5.6, but that's about as far as you can push it in terms of depth-of-field, so you might want to try something like f/8.

I would turn off the ambient light and add some diffusion to the Jansjos (just start with tissue paper or something for testing purposes). Also, it looks like your lights are not at a very high angle relative to the coin. You want them shining mostly downward onto the coin, the lights should almost be right next to the camera lens.

I'm guessing your setup requires you to manually focus, correct? This being a Canon, there's no reason for you not to tether the camera to the computer using the Zoom Browser software Canon provides and run the whole affair with your mouse and keyboard. No need to touch the camera once set up, and you get to focus the shot in real time on your monitor. That has the further benefit of letting you fine-tune the camera setup to get the absolute minimum distance from sensor-coin at which you can still achieve focus. Bigger the better, so when you downsize for publication you reap the maximum apparent sharpness benefit.

The 50/1.4 is not a macro lens (to belabor the obvious), so you're rather pushing its' capabilities here. The results need to be tweaked to their best, moreso than more forgiving glass.

Work hard to minimize reflected light from anywhere. Every photon of it which reaches your lens, from any direction, reduces contrast and contrast is probably your greatest challenge with this hardware. Therefore, ambient light is a no-no. Heck, I only shoot at night. This will be a good place to experiment with light diffusion. The only problem this creates is White Balance, but my experience with Canon is they adjust really nicely using bright white so a few sheets of printer paper is all you need for a custom white balance setting.

For postprocessing, crop to a square around the coin and reduce size for posting by even fractions so the software can do the reduction smoothly, as opposed to choosing an arbitrary size number unrelated to the original image. With a small reduction in jpg Quality you can get images of 800-1000px diameter (your target size for readability online) and a filesize under 500kb with no visible reduction in image quality so even Mobile browsers won't have difficulty with image-intensive threads.

With a camera of that sophistication there's no reason not to set a Custom White Balance for each shooting session, and not have to make any adjustment at all in post. It only takes a single shutter click. It's the same reason why I recommend running the whole show from your computer - faster, easier use and minimizing variables which can go wrong. If you own a Canon camera, there's no reason not to.

The whole purpose of cropping to just the coin is to reduce the amount your system and our eyes have to process to evaluate your coin. No reason to waste processor cycles or monitor screen space on areas of the shot which are meaningless. Cropping to coin only should always be the first step in postprocessing.

Masking off the background would be a nice touch. I agree with your "old t-shirt" bearing surface for the coin, but nicely-aged cotton shows a bit of reflectivity too even if not enough to bother the shot quality anyway.

Custom WB didn't really work for some reason...coins were looking super green. I think the white sheet of paper with the two IKEA lights might be too bright. Here's what I have now...certainly an improvement! Would these be good enough for an auction?










I found that sometimes the shots seemed better with the lights pulled away from the camera a bit...not sure. Maybe leaving them there and diffusing would work better, but sometimes moving the lights away to the sides seemed to produce nice results.

You can set MWB directly in zoombrowser without doing any shutter actions using the eyedropper. Couldn't be easier.