DESERT MOON NEWSLETTER, ISSUE 16, December 6, 2025

A 1.5 YEAR-RETROSPECTIVE AND THE COLOR OF GOLD

Hi Folks,

            The Holidays are upon us and this is always a good time for buying and selling.  I recall way back in the day when I spent a year selling on ebay, Fall was more active than the previous Summer months. This is what we are observing on the Desert Moon website in 2025, an uptick in orders for our coins this time of year.  And we have been buying too.  We have 4 NEWPS listed on the website today.  We will have 1 or 2 Cool Coin Showcases in December.

            This time of year is big anticipation for the New Year and that means of course, the FUN Show.  One of the grandest of the shows each year, the other being the ANA Worlds Fair of Money in the summer.  I confess we are also building up to make a great table at FUN.  I will have a Newsletter the week prior to FUN in January and reveal some of the NEWPS that will be at our table and give a preview of the build up to the show.  I am pretty stoked about what we will have to offer……….

            So here we are after starting this venture 1.5 years ago so I thought I would be retrospective here.  We chose to build our reputation organically, simply through word of mouth, no advertising except in the BST on the PCGS boards and see where it goes.  Take it slow and hopefully offer good value on what we deem to be quality offerings.  And hopefully nice and accurate images.  And so far, I think it is going well and we are at what I think is sustainable level of quality inventory that seems just about the right amount.  I just subscribed the website for 2 more years and we will just have to see beyond that.  I want to make improvements on the website, like finally get to putting up an archive gallery………..

In terms of how the numismatic coin market is doing, it still continues to be very strong for the kinds of coins we buy.  In auctions and private treaty sales, the best-known retail value guides continue to be a low estimate for the kinds of coins we are interested in obtaining as exemplified on the Desert Moon website. So that is a challenge but we are not going to lower our standards. As explained on the website, every single coin we sell online or at my table at shows is going to be something I would want in my own collection.  No exceptions. None. We have made occasional ‘mistakes’ when buying. These never make the website or my table at shows simply because we don’t want to sell these.  These few get wholesaled off at shows.  So every coin we sell on the website will meet our standards.  A prominent dealer told me going into this, that yes you will make mistakes but learn from them. I have and my buying has evolved over this initiation time period.  I assume it will continue to do so as I learn more about being on the other side of the table.

THE COLOR OF GOLD

Have you ever bought a coin online and waited with impatience for your precious newp to arrive only to open the package and ‘oh my, that does not look like its picture’.  Well we all have.  Hence here at Desert Moon I do everything I can to accurately depict the coins we sell in the images we post.  I have spent 20 years on numismatic photography and I feel I incrementally get better the more coins I am able to image.  This is a particular issue with gold coins which have surfaces that at least for me, have been a challenge to get near perfect images of, at least for some.  Over the years I have been able to get better at it, and I now am confident that any image of a gold coin I post is at least 95% accurate and as close to the color I see with my own eyes as possible.  The color of gold as we know comes in many shades and tones. That color on any given gold piece can subtly change depending on how the light hits the surfaces on the coin and the type of light, angle, intensity, etc.  Hence not only will we see it differently with our own eyes depending on these factors, but the camera will also produce images with colors dependent on lighting factors.

This week I was perusing the CACG Forum and came across a thread on a coin I had recently sold, an 1838-C Half Eagle.  I appreciated the enthusiasm by the collector who purchased it.  He put up my original image and the image produced by the grading company:

Desert Moon image

TPG image

As we all can see each of these images for this lovely coin have very different shades/colors/tones of gold. A poster asked the obvious question ‘which images look like the coin’?  The buyer/collector was tactful and basically said somewhere in between.  His answer is possible depending on what the lighting is where he is viewing it.  However, in the conditions that I view the coin, it looks like the images I produced.  I will say that it does not look like the TPG images, but there are caveats to this so read on.

So lets take a look at this abit more. I use a Nikon Z6ii camera body and the latest Nikon 105 mm macro lens. I took the image with 2 LEDs close to the lens in the most traditional orientation for taking close ups of coins. I take the images in RAW mode which does not overprint anything into the image file (other formats do). Then the images are imported into Photoshop for processing. I use the functions in PS as little as possible to get the final image. 

Tweeks of said functions in PS or other image processing software can significantly change the colors to where they are not representative of the coin in hand with your own eyes.  So here is the RAW image file as taken by the camera of the obverse prior to importing into PS:

Camera RAW file of 1838-C obverse

The only thing I did to the image in Camera RAW was to adjust the White Balance to my measurements using a gray card.  This is the white balance for these lights and conditions.  Different lights with different Color Temperatures will have a different white balance, so I measure for all lighting situations and hence adjust to those values for each.  Then the file is imported into PS.  For this coin, the images the camera took looked just like what I see for the coin with my own eyes in hand (which is normally how it goes), so image processing was very minimal and one can observe virtually no difference between the RAW image and my final composite image of the obverse and reverse above.

Why does the TPG image look the way it does?  Well I can make my images look pretty darn close to theirs with some image processing:

Heavily reprocessed image of the 1838-C Half Eagle

TPG image again as above

With just a bit more tweeking and a reshoot to reverse engineer the lighting setup, I could get even closer to the TPG image than above.  What comes out is a nice deep red/orange color.  I should note however that it is possible that with just the exactly right orientation of lights, the TPG image might actually come close to looking like the coin under those very specific conditions and likely close to being a unique lighting orientation.  But I don’t have the coin in hand any longer so I can’t try that experiment and did not see that look when studying the coin under the light in any orientation. Had I, I would have posted duplicates that brought out such color as I do for some of our listings.  I suspect instead that it is more likely there is some color enhancement via image processing, which I largely stay away from. 

I will continue to produce images of the coins as I see them in hand and as accurate as I am capable.  When the images the camera produces are the same as my eyes see for a coin in hand, we have confluence and the world just got a little better.  So when you see the color of a gold coin on our website, at least to my eyes in the lighting I am using, this is how the color really is.

So here we are. I am looking forward to continuing to learn and evolve my numismatic adventure on the other side of the table and we will just have to see where it goes.  Thanks for reading, and as always, you can inquire about our offerings by emailing us at desertmoonnm@yahoo.com.

Happy Holidays!  DM

Some of the NEWPS: