Color Problem

Oh I agree. These guys are the heat. I have picked up a lot of tips to improve my pics. They have come a long way from when I first started. It's the little things that make a pic look better. I would have never thought the pics could have gotten much better.

I've always cropped my full-face images as close to perfectly square as I could, before any further processing, to ease the load on sizing algorithms.

You're getting absolutely splendid results from an S2 IS, Southern Yankee. As an unabashed Canon fanboi I can only gloat, but in reality it's probably something that many competing brands are capable of in hands as careful as yours.

My only advice would be to shoot in as "neutral" a mode as possible, and apply these corrections later in postprocessing. Vivid Mode in an S2 IS adds both sharpening and color saturation in-camera. I believe this to be problematic because the camera uses a very small processor with relatively unsophisticated software, far less capable of seamless results than dedicated postprocessing software on a powerful (by comparison) home PC.

The Washington and Lincoln both seem to benefit from this setting, but the Franklin begins to look over-sharpened to me.

Unless you're using equipment of such high quality that postprocessing becomes completely irrelevant (like rmpsrpms does), I believe very strongly that a coin photographer needs to be as conversant with certain postprocessing steps as they are with the camera itself. There is nothing wrong with using postprocessing to make your coin look the same on the screen as it does in-hand.

Southern Yankee, it's time for you to start considering the tiny steps it will take to make your images, produced on a relatively old and down-spec camera, equal the quality of the very best images posted from sophisticated equipment. You've already stepped into the group of "the best photographers posting at Coin Community," and I think yet more improvement is possible. A consideration, though: not many people are going to be able to see any further improvements you make, simply because they've not seen many images of this quality.

Here I have posted some before and afters. The first ones are straight from the camera. The second ones have been done in Corel Paint Shop Pro. Remembered I had this program so I thought I would give it a shot. Still have some things to figure out on the program. These are my first attempts at post-processing. These are all shot under the same settings. ISO50 F4.5 1/100
Didn't think about changing anything at the time.

Ok I understand most of what you are talking about with exception to the G and B blowout. As for the red channel being to bright that is one of the colors I am colorblind to. I don't see all the red you are talking about. That's why I tend to stay away from collecting cents. I will tone down the sharpening some. These were all around 50% sharpening. I'll work on the shadowing. Have to figure out how to just do around the devices.

Forgot to mention that your lighting is excellent and gives good shadow definition around the devices already without having too many highlights. The adjustment I made was to contrast to push the darkest shadows just into black. When I do this on your image, the shadows are nearly continuous around the devices and look great. The program I use (Nikon ViewNX) has functions called "show lost shadows" and "show lost highlights" that I use extensively. Not sure if other programs have this available.

Thanks for that great explanation. I misunderstood about what you said about the shadows, but now with reading about it on the net and your illustration it's starting to make sense. Have to look into what my program has on that. My program has individual histograms on the colors but I never looked into using those. Always just used the overall histogram. So much to take in to account for just a simple pic. I see this is going to be quite a learning experience. Thank you so much for your help.

To add one small point to rmpsrpms' excellent explanation: The lighted area you're shooting for the Custom White Balance shot must fill the whole sensor. Whatever that takes; even moving the camera closer to the shot than you'll actually use for the coins. If any of the fringe shows on the sensor, it'll affect white balance.

Here's another try at it. This time using a short section of a yarn cone, with white index card pressed inside. This equalizes the uniformity within the beam and increases intensity further. As before, I'll show the "normal" exposure look vs the stock Jansjo and then a reduced brightness look to show uniformity better. I reduced the brightness even further than earlier shots to show bare Jansjo uniformity around the same spot size as the modified Jansjo.

Later tonight I'll take some pictures with them and see if there is any benefit in coin photography...