Washed Out Look On Coins Due To Reflection

That's a nice '36 Florin! What a contrast to those I have. Nice lighting--it brings out the details.

If you don't mind me adding my observations here...
At first glance, I thought this photo was a bit "posterized", judging from the abrupt color transitions. However, I could not find that in the file's histogram, so I'm guessing the camera has compressed the tonal range. I realize the photo appeared washed out, but the tonal range was quite compressed all the same. Setting your camera on a lower contrast setting might help. That said, you'll still pick up scattered light off a slab surface, which only post-processing may help alleviate. I had a go at the photo myself:



I find that digicams often oversaturate photos of silver coins, often leaving a color cast which I find unacceptable. In photoshop, I also adjusted the color balance and saturation to a coloration that seemed more reasonable--yet might not match "the coin in hand". In total, I adjusted levels, brightness/shadow, color balance, saturation, and curves to achieve the effect pictured above.

Eric,
Posterized means abrupt transitions between colors. It happens sometimes when using software that limits the "tonal range", ie the number of colors in the photo. The result can be sharp transitions between colors, or a painterly effect where the photo appears composed of color blocks. Or, think of those old street posters that used maybe 5 colors to depict something. A histogram is a graph of the different colors in the photo, which can be accessed in photoshop under windows->histogram. Sometimes that helps me see where I need to adjust the photo.

Ok...now I realize how the coin color gets a "patchy" look. If you look at the third screen grab that Learjet provided, you'll see the gaps in the histogram. This essentially means there are many places in the photo missing color transitions (if this is an effect that's noticeable to you). There are a few ways to preserve the color information better so you have more to work with. You can change the camera settings to stretch the amount of colors the camera will capture by changing contrast. While lowering contrast may result in a coin shot through a slab appearing "washed out", you'll actually have more photo data to manipulate.

And, if your camera provides this option, I'd also recommend shooting in 16 bit color, or editing the photo in 16bit under image->mode->16 bit. This should improve the tonal range further when editing contrast. Just some ideas from using Photoshop for 10 years--have fun!

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Shooting in RAW format may give greater bit depth than the standard jpeg compression also.

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Right--you can't capture 16-bit jpegs, thanks for the reminder. I only shoot in RAW mode.