Anyone Tried Tilt-Shift For Coins?

I have not used a tilt-shift lens, but I do occasionally use a tilt adapter between bellows and camera to achieve "pseudo-axial" lighting. The adapter can be used with any lens or bellows, and is pretty cheap. The one I use has 8-deg of adjustment range, and pairs nicely with goniometers with +/- 8-deg of adjustment range.

You do need to be careful when using tilt and/or shift with coins since both methods will create some perspective distortion. Go too far and it becomes very obvious. Most folks who tilt their coins to get a little axial reflection only do so a little bit because of this. Folks using longer lenses have the advantage here...longer lenses have more working distance, so the coin needs to be tilted less to get the direct reflections. I've always preferred smaller setups and thus shorter lenses, and have developed lighting techniques around this paradigm, but there are certainly some advantages to having a uniform axial illumination for some types of coins. If I did a lot of proofs I'd probably use the technique much more, but it's also useful for getting the "deep colors" out of toned coins. Anyway, just be careful when doing this to minimize the amount of tilt or shift to stay away from visible amounts of distortion.