Nice pics, but not perfect. You have room to improve in a few areas:
- Overall the image is a bit dark, yet this is masked by the high contrast and bright highlight areas. I'd suggest reducing contrast a little either in-camera or post. This will brighten the shadows a bit and even-out the overall image
- I'm not fond of the 3-light presentation on highly-lustrous cartwheel coins. An X-pattern is more pleasing and once you lower contrast a bit you'll be able to bring up the darker areas so a 3rd light is not needed. If you really need extra light to bring up the dark areas, a white reflector/diffuser may work better.
- You are probably sharpening a bit too much. This is often to personal taste but especially for high contrast and lustrous coins sharpening needs to be done super carefully.
- Overall, the luster is a bit over the top. The coin may have this much or even more luster, but it is obscuring detail that is important for grading. A bit (more?) of diffusion will balance this and brighten the light areas as well.
- You have both areas of under- and over-exposure. Reducing contrast a bit will help this, as would reducing your exposure a bit using exposure compensation or other methods. Blowing out silver coins is not as big an issue as copper or heavily-toned coins, but it's still not advised.
Here are the lost shadows and highlights. Not too bad but better to have fewer if possible:
- Side-by-side is nice but the presentation is too small. better to make the images larger. Standard here and on other forums is 800x800 for each obverse and reverse. This makes it better to put the images top-bottom so they will be large enough to see details for grading and better appreciation of the coin.
All the above said, I agree with other's comments that the images are pretty good already. Just a little tweaking and you're there.
Contact me for photographic equipment or visit my home page at:
http://macrocoins.comEdited by rmpsrpms
07/30/2015 11:19 pm
Posted 07/30/2015 5:53 pm
Nice work!
