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 Replies: 16 / Views: 2,328 |
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Valued Member
Italy
205 Posts |
Good morning  Looking for some tips on how to replicate the look&feel of the PCGS TrueView beauty shots. So far I have gathered that they use a dark setup (like a tent) and use harsh warm lights. One or more lights? I remember hearing they only use one light for grading so perhaps they do the same also for photos? Taking this photo as example:  Am I correct in saying only one light was used at around 11 o'clock? It was rather tilted as to achieve a darkened field. On the other hand, what about this second one:  Much harsher light and less or no tilt? shadows only slight appear at 12 o'clock. These are some examples of photos I took of the same coin (much diffused light) and right now I'm quite displeased with the final outcome: http://goccf.com/t/462579Thank you all for giving me some tips!  |
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Bedrock of the Community
United States
17495 Posts |
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Bedrock of the Community
 United States
94367 Posts |
Don't know how they do it, but I find their images consistently misleading.
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Pillar of the Community
United States
627 Posts |
They use multiple lights, probably halogens. Their pictures are consistently red-shifted - and they have the added benefit that they are shooting raw coins not coins behind plastic.
The saturation also seems to be consistently boosted in post processing for toned coins.
In effect, TrueView images seem to represent what a coin would look like on its absolute best day and in its absolute best light. In my experience, they are VERY far away from "True" for anything but blast white silver coins.
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Pillar of the Community
United States
627 Posts |
A concrete example of the red shift and saturation boosting. Below is a Russian coin in my collection. The images are the "TrueView" and my in hand color-true images. The coin exhibits none of the reds that the PCGS photo seems to suggest. They almost look like two different coins.   |
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Bedrock of the Community
United States
94367 Posts |
To me this is a misleading and unsound practice from a business standpoint.
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Pillar of the Community
Canada
8770 Posts |
WOW that is a big difference.
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Valued Member
 Italy
205 Posts |
Thank you for posting this article! I am actually familiar with it and I find it, devoid of numbers and specifics, quite difficult to follow and surprising at times. Just to give some examples: Quote:
I use very bright lights. Why? It allows me to use a very small aperture with a fast exposure. The result is a sharp image with very little-to-no camera shake Just a few words after they talk about 2.5 seconds shutter speeds (which is huge).  Moreover how can sharpness improve by small apertures? Afaik it's kind of the opposites: they would create artefacts and decrease sharpness (as they are usually far away from a lens sweet spot). On the contrary, given the flatness of the subject one would expect they to stay at the lens sweet spot (usually mid/low apertures). Also how is camera shakes even an issue as none would shoot bare-hand?
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Valued Member
Italy
205 Posts |
Quote:
A concrete example of the red shift and saturation boosting.... Thanks for showing this! Very drastic indeed  It reminds me a coin I was looking at yesterday. It has a very similar tonal shift:  
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Valued Member
Italy
205 Posts |
Quote:
Don't know how they do it, but I find their images consistently misleading Thank you Coinfrog. I kind of get what you mean. Perhaps it would be better if they were more consistent with how they take these photos and also openly document it. Something like saying given conditions x, y, z .. the coin looks like this..  I wish I could take those beauty shots too though... 
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Pillar of the Community
United States
878 Posts |
Photoshop!!!  |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
1865 Posts |
In my opinion Trueview is not true, they change the contrast, saturation etc, maybe to hide surface defects. The coins do not look in hand like their photos. I wonder if PCGS photographers were trained by ebay sellers who photoshop their coin pics LOL. Edited by livingwater
04/21/2024 8:24 pm
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Pillar of the Community
 United States
4680 Posts |
On one hand, it's nice to have super accurate pictures. On the other hand, if you subscribe to the theory that you grade coins mostly to sell them, then the TrueView photos are marketing assets. Nobody would buy the service if the images made the coins look undesirable to buyers.
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Pillar of the Community
United States
3926 Posts |
Coins look very different depending on the angle of the lighting. The two photos posted by @brg5658 are good examples of the use of axial (or pseudo-axial) light to bring out the deep toning colors in the field, versus more traditional diffused lighting from more of an angle versus the coin. If you hold the coin such that light reflects directly from the source to your eyes, you'll see that deep color come out. Axial lighting mimics this effect. And while PCGS swears they don't use axial, and I believe them, it does not take true axial lighting to bring out that effect. What non-coin photogs call this is "direct" reflection, so that's probably a better term to use. The color of the coin can change dramatically when lit with direct reflection versus the other type, "diffuse" reflection, as seen in @brg5658's second image. Unfortunately, PCGS seems to go a bit beyond this and significantly juices their images with postprocessing. I'm not against postprocessing as long as it makes the image look more like the coin, but I've seen many True Views that are way too red, and way too saturated, and don't look like the coin under any conceivable lighting situation. I've also seen coins that look more brilliant and colorful than the True View, so it all comes down to lighting the coin and processing the photo to look like the coin. Edited to add: for folks interested in the theory of photographic lighting, going way beyond the priniciples shared in most books, I recommend "Light Science and Magic". I have the 3rd edition but it's in its 6th edition. Here's a link to both: 3rd: https://www.amazon.com/Light-Scienc...p/02408081936th: https://www.amazon.com/Light-Scienc...p/0367860279Further edit: if you don't want to buy the book, you can look online for references to the "Family of Angles", which is a big part of lighting science and most germane to what I'm talking about above. Edited by rmpsrpms
04/21/2024 9:48 pm
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Pillar of the Community
United States
627 Posts |
I really have no big gripe with the axial-like approach. That is at least a pure methodologic choice. By contrast, the red shift of the PCGS TrueView images has driven me crazy for years. Back when Phil Arnold was still director of PCGS photography service (before he moved to GreatCollections), I had communicated with him directly about the red-shift. I never got a straight answer about why it may be happening, but I always thought it was likely a combination of the light source used (probably halogens) and some post-processing work-flow that is probably programmatically applied to their images when composited. I have some blast white medals and coins for which the TrueView images are superb and very representative. As an example the MS69 medal below:  |
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Pillar of the Community
United States
3926 Posts |
Yes, IMO it would be better if they could keep their lighting style, but reduce the post-process juicing. It seems the new staff may be trying to do this, but based on some old/new TV images published recently, they still have work to do. The new ones have too low contrast, and they changed the lighting to reduce the direct/axial content, so the whole character of the image is degraded.
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Replies: 16 / Views: 2,328 |
Posted 04/21/2024 08:34 am
