Dark Coins Under Bright Light Vs Lighter Coins Under Bright Light.

What are you really wanting to discuss? The advantage/disadvantages, solutions to, what surface under light(proof vs. business strike? Narrow it down Mike. There's much on the photography thread on how/what is effective lighting, don't need a rehash. We've about killed equipment needed and what we all use. So just a like or dislike of glarey, reflected black coins?

Oh, you mean the ways to optically "hide" blemishes. That is a practice quite common apparently, I don't run across it in the sites I haunt. Mine use typical digital pix without much "Photo-editing". I have Photoshop too...


For some reason I get along better with a straight digitized picture, eyes to brain I guess. When I look at the PCGS stuff, it looks , well, just wrong. I don't see "the" coin, I see an Interpreted Version of the coin, not how it really looks. Their "techniques do nothing for me to advance a firm perspective of the coin. No, don't like GC's nor PCGS or NGC's for the most part. They don't look real to me. I am able see "thru" some glarry photos and washouts, but prefer those to a gray/white image. That what you're asking?

The amount of light is somewhat irrelevant...doubling the light, and doubling the shutter speed, results in the same exposure. If you double the light, but keep the same exposure parameters (ISO, shutter speed, aperture) then you will over-expose the shot. So I guess you're asking if it's worse to over-expose lightly-toneed coins vs darkly-toned ones, but in reality it's bad to over-expose either.

Basically, Baseball and I have had an ongoing debate specifically over Great Collections pictures being overexposed with too much light making lightly toned coins appear to be unattractive. I have purchases many coins from GC and have zero complaints. There has never been any surprises when I have received a coin. In a Recent poll I posted, we had a spat about the following coin:



He contended it would look better inhand without the spotlight over it. I can't see how it would. It has toned in an unattractive way and was CAC approved, making it most likely original but I don't see very much eye appeal. I would expect it to look just like it does in the pictures if I purchased it.

I have purchased both darkly toned and lightly toned Seated dollars from Great Collections with no complaints about how the coins were represented in the pictures. Here are a few of them.





My point is, the lighting in pictures can't get rid of ugly. If you have an ugly coin, no matter how you tweak the lighting, you're still going to have an ugly looking coin and I don't believe Great Collections is an offender.

This is not really a dark vs light question. Both the GC and the TV photos are nearly perfectly exposed. The issue is the way they are lit. The TV is lit from high angle lighting, such that the highlights are on the upper surfaces of the devices. This has the effect of shining the light through the toning, such that colors are shown like they would be when the coin is held in hand and light is shone from a light high above. The GC coin was necessarily shot in the slab, so shining lights from a high angle would cause reflections off the slab. The lights are thus at a much lower angle, indicated by the reflections off the edges of the devices. Low angle lights make a grazing reflection off the toned areas, and this changes the interference patterns that are responsible for the toning colors. Interestingly, there are toned areas in the GC photo that don't show up in the TV. This is because there are areas of the coin at angles where the TV lighting does not show up color properly! But in general, the TV image is showing toning in a way much closer to how you would see it in hand.

Mike and Baseball...always bickering about GC's photography.

Anyway, I agree with rmpsrpms here - the Trueview pics most likely represent the toning in hand.

wow ok mike my mistake have agreat one