Taking coin photos with iPhone

[Heliodromus]

A perennial subject on coin forums is photography, which is almost an essential part of the hobby. One can of course go to town with nice DSLR cameras, high quality macro lenses, fancy lighting setups, etc, and get great results if you know how to use this stuff!

I used to have a DSLR (Canon EOS) camera, and tried a variety of cheap lens/adaptor macro options (incl. a DIY franken-lens made out of an enlarger lens/etc), but nowadays just use my iPhone XR (i.e. iPhone 10 - not the latest greatest), so thought I'd share what a minimal coin photography setup can look like, and what you can expect out of it.

So there it is - iPhone resting on a chopped up milk bottle, and an IKEA JANSO gooseneck LED light. IKEA currently only sell this light in a $7.99 version that plugs into a USB port, but mine is an older one that has a heavy base and uses a regular power adaptor. You can find these older ones on eBay/etc. The gooseneck is key here to allow for adjustment of lighting angle.

Rather than using the default iPhone camera app, I instead use the "Halide" app, which is free, and has good support for macro photography. Here is how that looks. As you can see a 20mm coin pretty much fills the screen using Halide's maximum 3x setting.

Having taken photos of both sides of the coin (usually with consistent lighting), I then use the free GIMP photo/image-editing application on my desktop to combine both sides into a single image, and make other adjustments (white balance, scaling, etc). There are plenty of alternatives to GIMP for photo editing, but this is what I use, and find GIMP also useful for other coin-related purposes such as sketching diagrams, annotating photos. etc.

If you're impatient, scroll down to see what the results look like.

Here's what my overall work flow consists of:

1) Adjust lighting to best bring out details of the coin. Every coin is different, depending on surfaces, wear, etc. The JANSO gooseneck light is my default choice, but I also have a daylight LED desktop lamp I sometimes use instead, or sometimes take coins outside to use sunlight (easy with this type of minimal iPhone setup). Lighting is really THE most important part of coin photography.

2) Take photos of each side of coin, using 3-sec timed shutter release. Using the timer gives the iPhone time to settle after you've pressed the shutter button, to avoid camera shake. This is critical for macro photography, where the tiniest shake will ruin the focus. Sometimes I'll take multiple photos with different lighting to see which I like best. I use Halide's white balance settings to select the appropriate light source (LED vs sunlight, etc), but this isn't that important since I'll correct that later in GIMP.

3) I use the iPhone's photo sharing options to e-mail the photos to myself (using Gmail) so that I can then save them to my desktop computer and use GIMP there to combine/adjust them. No doubt there are alternative ways to join/edit/etc using your phone and online applications.

4) I use GIMP to rotate/join/crop/scale the obv/rev photos and combine into a single image. I also use GIMP to select while balance (typically manually, pointing to my white background as a reference, but sometime just using GIMP's auto adjustment. If you don't adjust white balance then your photos are likely to have a blue or yellow tinge depending on what type of light source you used. In theory you could set the white balance correctly when you took the photo in the first place, but it's much easier just to do it afterwards. I also use GIMP's "levels" controls to adjust contrast, and sometimes color controls too to adjust color to remove any tinge remaining after white balance.

Here's the kind of result you can expect from this. Once you are used to GIMP it takes few minutes per coin to go from start to finish. It's kinda fun, as long as you don't have too many to do all at once!

I'm maybe odd in that I often like to leave the shadows on my photos to make them feel more organic and give a feel for what the lighting was, but I realize most people probably don't like this! There are various ways to avoid shadows (raise coin above background), or remove them (e.g. in photo editor). My preferred way is to use the remove.bg (remove background) web site which does it automatically. At the free level remove.bg limits the resolution of it's output, but I find this good enough for my purposes.

Here is same photos as above, but having used remove.bg to remove background (separately for obv, rev, before joining).

The above photo was scaled in GIMP to 800 pixel width (i.e. approx 800x400), which is the standardized size I use for all my collection and reference photos, and I think is more than enough for online sharing. The unscaled version is way larger, around 4000x2000 pixels, but if you really need that kind of size (for printing perhaps), then maybe it's worth investing in a nice camera and macro lens to get better quality.

Note that the copy stand in my setup isn't being used at all other than as a flat base to set the camera up on. It's a convenient size to take outside if I want to use sunlight, and don't want to worry about finding a flat surface to put the camera + coin on.

Edited October 25, 2024 by Heliodromus

[CPK]

Nicely done. Shows that you certainly don't need an expensive or complicated setup for decent coin photography!

[ela126]

i tried downloading the Halide app, which said it was free on the app store, but then once you get into it it says "we say we're free, but we're not free".. Maybe the old version was and is free?

Anyway, very nice pictures,!i'm forever struggling to get good ones, although i think shininess from wax is may main issue. Once you get a light on them it reflects back and makes it unappealing. 

 

[KenDorney]

What version is it?  I have a 13 Pro and it takes horrid pics.  Very digitized no matter what I try.  I currently use a DSLR, but there are times when a simple phone pic works.

[Heliodromus]

I didn't realize Halide is no longer free - it seems that people using Halide I got Halide II for free (my version is 2.17.2) when it came out. I like the app, and would probably pay the current $59.99 purchase price if I had to, now that I know I like it, but maybe worth seeing what other alternatives there are.

I'm not sure what would explain the iPhone 13 Pro taking bad pics - I'm using the older iPhone XR, and it seems that improving the camera is one of the things that Apple puts most effort into with each new version. Maybe a matter of settings?

 

[Heliodromus]

4 hours ago, ela126 said:

Anyway, very nice pictures,!i'm forever struggling to get good ones, although i think shininess from wax is may main issue. Once you get a light on them it reflects back and makes it unappealing. 

Thanks!

Yes, shiny coins are certainly harder to photograph. I'm not really a fan of wax, at least not when used excessively (some coins are noticeably slighty tacky). I'll sometimes wash newly acquired coins with liquid soap and warm water, rubbing them between my fingers, then dry by rubbing on a paper towel, to generally clean them and remove excess wax and any accumulated surface dirt/dust, and this can certainly help.

In general the trick with shiny coins, whether due to wax, or metal/surfaces, is a combination of:

1) Use a diffused light source, such as sunlight on a cloudy day, or a lamp shining thru some type of diffuser, and/or

2) Light the coin from the side at a low angle, to avoid the light reflections directly back to the camera that you get if lighting from above.

Both of the above can also help i you have a somewhat pitted coin, to even out reflection across the coin.

 

[JayAg47]

The cameras on iPhone 15 pro are so good that it brings out the microscopic hairline scratches on coins that are invisible to the naked eye, which I don’t like, although their zoom is great, especially if I wanted to take pic of the stars. Not sure about iPhone 16 though! 
Previously I had iPhone 8, its camera was perfect for snapping coins. 

 

Edited October 26, 2024 by JayAg47

[Orange Julius]

Nice photo. These days I think that in most cases you can get great images from a phone and ditch the camera. I had a iPhone XS that took pretty good pictures but recently upgraded to a iPhone 15 Pro that takes great photos and has its own built in macro lens. The below are recent images, the first one from just last night, that I shot handheld, cropped, deleted backgrounds and combined in a matter of maybe 5 minutes each. Some are a bit gold due to the lamp next to the couch. 🛋️ Below the images are the free apps I use.

[Nerosmyfavorite68]

It certainly gives me hope for my setup.  I like the pictures!

I have a Samsung.  I despise ITunes, so I when I retired the iphone in 2013, it's been Samsung ever since.  The auto photos are rather crappy, but the manual setting is pretty good.  In fact, I have much better manual results on it than when I try manual with my dslr.

I could envision a point where I am able to rephotograph coins as they come in, but the photography of the unphotographed ones will probably never happen.  It's just too much of a slog to try to handle all the coins, and then go into Photoshop, figure out the sizes, resize both so they're equal, stitch them together, and then try to edit out the background.  It's been taking me 30 minutes to an hour per coin, just for my less-than-stellar attempts.

[Heliodromus]

13 hours ago, Orange Julius said:

The below are recent images, the first one from just last night, that I shot handheld

Those are excellent. It's impressive that you were able to get such good focus handheld! I wonder if there's some smarts in the camera assisting with that?

I've often thought that there'd be a "market" for an iPhone coin photo app that worked kind of like the bank ones used for check deposit - the camera automatically taking the photo as soon as it detects the image right size and in focus. This could then be combined with automatic joining and background removal for a one-stop solution - snap, snap and done. The reason I put "market" in scare quotes is that nowadays people expect most software to be free and funded some other way, so it'd be hard to justify the effort to build something like this.

 

Edited October 26, 2024 by Heliodromus

[Orange Julius]

Thanks! Yeah I do get some blurry images doing it this way and have to take the shot at the right point in my breathing like a sniper but usually get one good image out of 5 or so.

i usually have my feet up on a table in front of the couch and use my legs to stabilize my hands haha. The initial image after squaring it up looks like below, then I take out the background and combine. Most times there is no image editing.

Edited October 26, 2024 by Orange Julius

[Nerosmyfavorite68]

That's a much more decent result than mine. 

[rasiel]

In a pinch I've used a very similar setup with the only significant difference that it's easy to eliminate shadows by just raising the coin.

Though I think it mostly falls on deaf ears I'll repeat that if you want to get good feedback about your technique or equipment you should do your test shots with modern coins. This is simply because ancient coins are unique but we all can make easy comparisons to modern ones. An old Wheat penny is an ideal choice because the lines on the reverse make for a good test of sharpness. Here I compare the same coin shot with an Iphone 13 Pro using the setup above vs using a Nikon DSLR w/ a dedicated macro lens. To me it's no contest but beauty is in the eye of the beholder I guess.

Rasiel

 

[Heliodromus]

12 hours ago, rasiel said:

To me it's no contest but beauty is in the eye of the beholder I guess.

Of course a better camera + lens is going to produce better results, but this thread is about what you can do with an iPhone.

Here's what my iPhone XR does with autofocus. It's the only wheatie I have to hand.