How Can I Help This Photo

Try adjusting sharpness and contrast. What editing program are you using?

Here's your photo after sharp/contrast adjustments in gimp. A little improved. Basically it looks like you were a bit out of focus when you took the shot. Was the camera mounted?

I'm not sure about your Canon camera, but mine under the menu had the option to change the quality of images taken. I believe they are something like normal, fine, and superfine. Try setting it at the highest quality setting so when you come back to crop it won't look as blurry. Also you might want to try moving the camera as close as it can focus on the penny. I like to use Lightroom 3 to edit my photos, but it is like $300 or something like that. If you have a Mac computer, iphoto works great too.

That's a little more like it.

Color can be re-found. You should have a Custom white balance function that'll fix it for you.

ok lets try this

lol thanks dave! I actually had the wrong reverse in the last picture so I just updated it. I know your not going to like this but I am using a flash light until I can get to the store and get the proper lighting

Whatever works for you, buddy. It's about results, not methods.

Love the look of that coin.

Something I note worth mentioning, which your lens suffers from: See the greenish hue around the rim of the coin, and where the shadow meets the paper? That's called axial chromatic aberration, and is likely something you're not going to be able to correct. It happens when a lens is not able to focus every single light wavelength at the same distance relative to the sensor. Zooms tend to suffer more from this than fixed lenses, and your SX30's huge zoom involves more optical compromises than most.

The color shift is most noticeable at areas of high contrast, like where the copper color or dark shadow meet the brighter white background. Your only hope of minimizing it is to drastically reduce the contrast, which is probably an unacceptable compromise in the quality of the image since we really don't want the coin blending into the background.