Any tips for Gold coin Photography?

[Simon]

I have had success with my photography of copper coins, most silver and even electrum coinage but gold coins I rarely do well with. 

I have issues with the glare, I am trying not to change the photos for the sake of trying to capture the true image of each coin. I am going to try to rephotograph my entire collection but I cringe when I am trying to work with the gold coins. 

Here is a beautiful coin but I just cant get the shot. In this case I darkened it. 

 

here is an electrum coin, It came out much better. 

 

If anyone has basic tips , I would very much appreciate it. 

Thank You in advance. 

Simon

 

[Ed Snible]

Gold is very hard to photograph!  Here are six professional pictures of the same coin:

These pictures appeared on the auction catalog or web sites of numismatic auctioneers Harlan J Berk, Classical Numismatic Group (twice), Heritage, Stack's Bowers, and the coin grading company Numismatic Guaranty Corporation.

These images were taken over the span of eighteen years. The version with the red background was scanned from a printed auction catalog. All of the other images are taken directly from auction sites or the slab company's slab verification image.

This coin did not change color in the last 18 years. Something about the lighting situation and the camera's color profile was different enough that each of these pictures is different.

[CPK]

I know what you mean. I have only one ancient gold coin and it is tough to get the right balance. Either it's too pale, or too neon, or too orangey. Since I've got only one, I can't offer much helpful advice except that in my case a lower light angle helped highlight the coin's design without reflecting too much light. I'm still not 100% satisfied, it might be a little dark, but it's probably about the best I'll be able to do:

JUSTINIAN I, AD 527-565
AV Solidus (20.95mm, 4.32g, 6h)
Struck 542-565. Constantinople mint, 5th officina
Obverse: D N IVSTINI-ANVS P P AVG, helmeted and cuirassed bust of Justinian I facing, holding globus cruciger in his right hand and with a shield over his left shoulder
Reverse: VICTORIA AVGGG E, angel standing facing, holding long staff surmounted by a staurogram in right hand and a globus cruciger in left; star in right field, CONOB in exergue
References: DOC 9e, MIB 7, SB 140

For comparison, here are two different auction house photos of the same coin:

 

[Simon]

31 minutes ago, Ed Snible said:

These pictures appeared on the auction catalog or web sites of numismatic auctioneers Harlan J Berk, Classical Numismatic Group (twice), Heritage, Stack's Bowers, and the coin grading company Numismatic Guaranty Corporation.

These images were taken over the span of eighteen years. The version with the red background was scanned from a printed auction catalog. All of the other images are taken directly from auction sites or the slab company's slab verification image.

This coin did not change color in the last 18 years. Something about the lighting situation and the camera's color profile was different enough that each of these pictures is different.

Damn Ed, I never realized so much variation of photography in one coin, I was just trying to get the best picture without manipulation. Thank you for pointing it out, I now know I am not the only one with a problem. 

 

21 minutes ago, CPK said:

I know what you mean. I have only one ancient gold coin and it is tough to get the right balance. Either it's too pale, or too neon, or too orangey. Since I've got only one, I can't offer much helpful advice except that in my case a lower light angle helped highlight the coin's design without reflecting too much light. I'm still not 100% satisfied, it might be a little dark, but it's probably about the best I'll be able to do:

Thank you CPK, my added headache is these coins are concaved. since my specialty is after the coin reform. the dull gold is easier but anything still shiny is a pain. I am trying to keep to my rules but I am finding it more difficult. 

I am going to take your suggestion on light but I will try more indirect light. Right now I have a light ring I use for most of the coppers and the results are very good. 

My photograph table is not set up to be portable but I do live in Florida, perhaps I can move it outside for a experiment. 

Here is another problem coin, again too much shine.  This shot did not come out badly but at the same time it barely shows the luster. Silvered trachea are rarely like this one. 

 

 

[Salomons Cat]

Stupid question from someone who doesn't own a gold coin and has never seen one:
How is the visibility of the details of an average ancient gold coin when you hold it in your hand compared to silver?

[Severus Alexander]

I’m no expert, but besides using more indirect light to deal with the glare problem, I would recommend being very careful with the white balance. If you can include a white or grey card in the shot and then use that as your white balance reference in software (e.g. Canon DPP Pro), you’ll get much more accurate colour. Without doing this it’s pretty much impossible, I’ve found!

[Ocatarinetabellatchitchix]

Hello Simon. We have a member here on NF who is a professional numismatic photographer: @HipShot Photography  Maybe he’ll be willing to share some tricks if you PM him. He also has a nice website.

https://hipshotphotography.com

 

Edited April 14 by Ocatarinetabellatchitchix

[Simon]

1 hour ago, Salomons Cat said:

Stupid question from someone who doesn't own a gold coin and has never seen one:
How is the visibility of the details of an average ancient gold coin when you hold it in your hand compared to silver?

No a stupid question, in the late empire the coins were used primarily by the government, the saw less circulation than the copper and billion coins. So more detail and normally better struck. I collected for many years before I owned my first gold coin. 

37 minutes ago, Severus Alexander said:

I’m no expert, but besides using more indirect light to deal with the glare problem, I would recommend being very careful with the white balance. If you can include a white or grey card in the shot and then use that as your white balance reference in software (e.g. Canon DPP Pro), you’ll get much more accurate colour. Without doing this it’s pretty much impossible, I’ve found!

Thank you, I photograph on thimble sized stands, however I use a tiny box with black cloth wrapped over that, I will change it to white, I will see if it makes it easier. Thanks again. 

15 minutes ago, Ocatarinetabellatchitchix said:

Hello Simon. We have a member here on NF who is a professional numismatic photographer: @HipShot Photography  Maybe he’ll be willing to share some tricks if you PM him. He also has a nice website.

I like the word professional, thank you for the info. That is valuable info for me working on a long-term project. 

Edited April 14 by Simon

[robinjojo]

For glare and "white out" areas I'd avoid using a flash. indirect light is best, as pointed out by Severus Alexander.  Also, I tend to have better results using a white background.  Taking a photo of a gold coin on a black background is problematic for me in regards to hue.

Here are three of my efforts.

This photo was made with a white background; the black was added latter in Photoshop.  However, the hue still makes this coin "brassy" and not more yellow, as it actually is.

 

Much better!  This photo even picks up some of the orange toning.  Since I tend to depend on natural light, the results can vary depending on the amount of sunlight coming through the skylight.  I don't remember if the day was sunny when I took this photo, back in 2020, but it probably was.

Again, the coin could be a bit yellower.  I think part of the issue is that I take the photos looking down on them.  This can create lighting variations as the shadow of the camera cuts across the coin.  I should set up a more professional arrangement, with the coin mounted in a way that avoids this problem.  As I recall I did try to change the hue of this coin through Photoshop, with good but not totally accurate results.  Again, the black background was added after the photo shoot.

 

Edited April 14 by robinjojo

[AncientJoe]

Gold is tough, especially concave/convex coins. My suggestion would be to use very diffuse light, ideally cloudy sunlight or artificial lights decently far away from the coin. Slight angle changes relative to the camera can make a significant difference in a concave coin so ensuring your setup allows for subtle movements will be helpful as well.

[Hrefn]

Having recently returned from viewing the Impressionist paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the mutability of light and color is at the forefront of my consciousness.  For us humans, there is no single true perception of an object such as a coin or a haystack.  Rather, our sense impression is circumstantial, depending on ambient light, time of day, fog, even the quality of our own visual apparatus.    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haystacks_(Monet_series)

Further, that sense impression is only sensory input which is then assembled and rationalized in the brain, and all of our brains differ.  I had a professor who wisely said, “You only see what you are looking for.”  I would elaborate that thought to say you are more likely to perceive what you have been trained to look for.  The educated brain and the naive observer do not perceive the same thing at all, even though to an outsider it may appear they are regarding the same object.  Nor will their visual memory retain the same “picture.”  

To illustrate, look at the first coin which @Simon uses to illustrate the difficulty of photographing gold.   One side is concave, the other convex.  The whole coin can never be all in the same focal plane.  Low angle light may highlight the devices, but the blazing surface reflecting direct light is also part of the reality of the coin.  There can be no single true image.

For me, the most important element of the coin is the figure to the right of Christ.  My catalog entry describes this:

Romanus IV Diogenes, struck in Constantinople, Sear 1859.  His wife is figured prominently, Eudokia Makrembolitissa, widow of his predecessor Constantine X.  Their marriage legitimized his claim to the throne.

Eudokia Makrembolitissa was reputed to be the most beautiful woman of her time.  Here is a photograph that attempts to capture her in all her apple-cheeked glory.  But bringing in the light from the right, as I have, it is really a better picture of her spouse.   There is no photograph which will capture every nuance of any coin’s appearance optimally.  

Which is why I have no objection to manipulating the exposure, intensity, color, shadows, etc. of a photograph of a coin to bring out any desired characteristic, so long as it is an attempt to reveal what is really there.  Like Monet with his Haystacks, all the images are true, and they are all less than the complete truth.  And that is OK, and why photography is an art.  

 

[Kaleun96]

I've never photographed a gold coin so can't add much specifics to this discussion but I can highly recommend the book Light Science & Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting to help with problems like this. It touches on many aspects of lighting for a range of materials and desired outcomes without getting overly technical or going into too much detail. The examples are well documented with example photos and diagrams so I find it easy to jump to a specific section of the book without having to read everything that came before it.

For this situation the advice would probably be similar to what has been said already but it'll help you hone in on achieving that specific lighting, e.g. what range of angles your light needs to be at relative to the coin and give you some tricks that you can try to balance the ratio of direct vs diffused reflections.

Concave coins are definitely tricky, it's hard to balance getting even lighting across the whole surface without making the coin appear too "flat". So I would probably use both high-angle non-diffused lighting with a mix of diffused lighting that can reach all the parts of the coin. It shouldn't matter much whether you're using flash or LEDs or sunlight, the control of brightspots/over-exposure is entirely up to you, it's not ingrained in the light source. Similarly with the background, the colour matters little if you have control over your camera.

The direct light will be your "key" light, i.e. the one providing the main source of reflections and is contributing the most to the look of the resulting image. With a concave coin, it will likely make some parts of the concave edge opposite the light look different to the edges closer to the light, simply due to the different angles relative to the light (one way to avoid this is with axial lighting). So you would then use your diffused light, the "fill" light, to help balance that out so there's not such a big contrast in the exposure of the edges but you don't want the diffused light overpowering the image and filling in all the shadows.

Oh another thing you can do to help with getting even exposure from the concave edges is to tilt the coin towards the "key" light so that the surface of the coin is no longer perpendicular with the camera. This might require focus stacking due to the increased "depth" of the coin but it's what some auction houses use to help get high angles of reflection without using axial lighting (for example, see this commercial setup that some auction houses use).

 

edit: I see a free PDF version is available online hosted on someone's website but I'm not sure if this is being shared legally so won't link it directly here. It was the third result on Google for me. I'll reproduce one of the figures from it below to illustrate what the book is like for those interested. This particular figure explains how the angle of the light relative to the subject doesn't necessarily determine whether the reflections will be direct/specular or diffused, instead the distance from the light to the subject needs to be considered to know what reflections you will ultimately get.

 

Edited April 15 by Kaleun96

[Limes]

From my personal experience, I had a lot of trouble taking pictures of my only golden coin. The photo shown below is attempt no. I-dont-know-how-many. I've used different background colours, yellow, white, blue, black and this one, dark grey. And took photos in different lighting: day, evening, sunlight, clouded, artificial lighting, and so on. This one was taken on a clouded day, when the light was sort of gray if you know what I mean. 

My advice, since you asked: keep trying until your are statisfied. That's basically it. I don't have an advice about a set up, since I dont have any. But members of this board, as mentioned above, have professional set ups, and likely better camera's and/or lenses. As I don't feel like investing in that kind of equipment, this it what it is, for me. Which I'm fine with. 

Good luck experimenting with your photoshoot 🙂

16 hours ago, Salomons Cat said:

Stupid question from someone who doesn't own a gold coin and has never seen one:
How is the visibility of the details of an average ancient gold coin when you hold it in your hand compared to silver?

Interesting question. I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer it, since I have only one gold issue, but I think there's no difference. In hand both appear better than on photo's where e.g. scratches are more visible. 

[HipShot Photography]

On 4/14/2024 at 3:17 PM, Ed Snible said:

Gold is very hard to photograph!  Here are six professional pictures of the same coin:

 

To me, none of those look like they were taken by a professional coin photographer. To be fair, there are so many variables in photography, and over 18 years it seems impossible to make them look the same, even still, they should all be of better quality overall. I've seen some horrid work on the NGC website.

Here's a sample of some gold coin images I took, from ancient, medieval, and modern times. Some were certified, others were raw.  It's all about the lighting. All of these were shot on a white background (to help light the edges) and the background was removed in post-production. These are presented in my version of the TrueView style.

 

[Qcumbor]

Not that I would dare comparing my pictures to his, yet I tend to agree with @AncientJoe when he writes "My suggestion would be to use very diffuse light, ideally cloudy sunlight". It's what I try to do myself, hence not everyday can you have the star alignment allowing to take nice pictures.

For some reason I've always been at better ease with a black background, on a cloudy or a snowy day, with slightly underexposed shots to avoid glare

 

And for that one, my pic follwed by NGC's and Leu's

 

Q

Edited April 16 by Qcumbor

[panzerman]

I am not great at it/ these turned out not too bad though....

[rasiel]

The problem isn't gold. There's nothing about the physics of light that makes yellow shades more challenging to capture than other wavelengths. Scyphates are a bitch though. This is because it's very difficult to get even lighting across the coin. The convex side's north rim typically blocks the light while while the bulge in the concave side obscures the opposite angle. There are several solutions to this problem. You can just work from a farther distance to allow the light source to be positioned such that light can cover more of the surface, you can diffuse the light source to make the lighting less directional (and thus minimize risk of clipping the highlights), you can add a secondary light. Or you can just live with not having all the coin areas properly lit. 

This is one of mine. Not going to win any awards fo' sho'

 

And here's one of my two Constantine V's which is much better done (using the same setup) and representative of about the best I can do with my expertise and equipment.

Rasiel 

[theotokevoithi]

Concave coins are very difficult to be photographed (even lighting of the surface).

If we must accept the use of software editing, Photoscape is the simplest freeware solution i think.

But if we accept software editing , we must accept artificial toning too.

It is like removing wrinkles from a photo using photoshop.

The danger is to buy coins that are totally different than the photo of the seller, but it can be considered a form of art and a collector must play with his coins (hobby).

A post of unedited photo of a coin and the software edited photo of the same coin is a good idea.

[CPK]

1 minute ago, theotokevoithi said:

Concave coins are very difficult to be photographed (even lighting of the surface).

If we must accept the use of software editing, Photoscape is the simplest freeware solution i think.

But if we accept software editing , we must accept artificial toning too.

It is like removing wrinkles from a photo using photoshop.

The danger is to buy coins that are totally different than the photo of the seller, but it can be considered a form of art and a collector must play with his coins (hobby).

A post of unedited photo of a coin and the software edited photo of the same coin is a good idea.

I don't think it needs to be that way. Image editing programs, properly used, help bring a photo closer to a coin's real-life appearance. The OP is interested (as most of us are) in getting a photo that is as close to reality as possible and using software tools to achieve this end is not being deceptive at all.

After all your digital camera uses its own image building software to adjust and create the photo internally. What's the difference with using an external program to further adjust the same parameters?

[panzerman]

My photos did not make it/ try again😉

[HipShot Photography]

Here's one of three 1-kilo gold coins I had the privilege of shooting recently. This was done with my hybrid axial lighting setup. The gold maple is in there for size reference.

 

Edited April 21 by HipShot Photography

[CPK]

Beautiful photography @HipShot Photography - I really like your work and website. (And looking forward to your book!)

1 Kilo coin?? That is wild!

[panzerman]

[rasiel]

1 hour ago, HipShot Photography said:

Here's one of three 1-kilo gold coins I had the privilege of shooting recently. This was done with my hybrid axial lighting setup. The gold maple is in there for size reference.

 

Hell of a shot! (and a rare opportunity too)

Rasiel

[rasiel]

25 minutes ago, panzerman said:

Man, that's a hell of a coin. Wish I had it for just a couple minutes to do it justice!
You can't even be bothered to take it out of the plastic 😅