Found This Set Up. Opinions Please.

Like Ray said, I'm shooting Canon 70D.

The RAW format of the image is 256 MB. Can't get it in an e-mail. Do you know how I would do this? Do I need a third party image host?

Ok, here is the same coin with the Rev this time. Cropped and resized using Gimp.

I changed to Eval metering, and set to Neut on most everything.




No PP except for cropping. I don't like the lighting. I know its a low relief coin by nature, (although I think it's a decent strike for a Cir Strike), and I think adding another light would wash it out. I guess this is where I would have to play with the image in PP? Am I on the right path?

Better? What do you think?

I've no idea whether the color is correct, nor will anyone else except you. With no background for reference I've no way of knowing if your White Balance is correct or not.

We have so many people doing so many things I can't keep up.

Your RAW file seems a factor of 10 larger than it should be. 18MP RAW files from a T2i are only 22-23MB. 250+ MB is ridiculous, too large to shoot RAW with any regularity. I can only imagine how long something like that would take to convert to JPG - have you tried one? My system - very similar to yours, same overclocked processor - took about 15 seconds to convert a T2i RAW file.

You're at the point of needing to play a bit with diffusion on lustrous coins. That will help the light/dark look of your images, and in conjunction with specifying metering locations you can lengthen exposures and get the whole coin a bit brighter.

Ok, here are the 2 different WB settings with a portion of the backround for comparison.

Tungsten


Custom


Tungsten


Custom


Just Black construction paper.
Which do you think? Does this help?

Great macro shot of the "D" -- did you use stacking, or is this a single shot?

Dar...great to see the high magnification image with the M5! Note that your M5 shot is much higher than 5:1 magnification. Looks almost 10:1. This is not a bad thing, as the objective can be used over a wide range, but sharpness will be even better if you run it a bit lower mag. If this is the magnification you're looking for, then you might want to consider a higher mag objective to get even more sharpness at this mag level. Of course, no matter what, the quality is high enough that you will need to stack to get the entire depth of field in focus.

Regarding the Perfex vs Vivitar, they look very similar to me. Looks like you were focused a bit higher with the Perfex. The lapel area on Perfex is sharper than on the Vivitar, but Date and MM are sharper on the Vivitar. You're shooting near 1.5:1 magnfication so depth of field is going to be fairly shallow. You may need to do a 3-stack at this magnification to get all parts of the image in focus. When you do that, I would bet you could not tell the difference between the two lenses until you look at 100% pixel level, and even then it will be subtle.

Note the brand is Perfex, which is a marketing brand of some unknown lens mfr. I sent it in a spare Nikon case I had. It did very well in the original 75mm shootout I did several years ago...

Dar:



This is an awesome site for taking coin pics:

http://coinimaging.com/photography.html