Coin Photography: Focus Stacking with an iPhone

A challenge I have had with cataloguing my coin collection is how to best photograph my coins. For the longest time I used a digital 'point and shoot' camera that I would take with my on vacations, since it had a higher MegaPixel count than my phone. I recently upgraded to an iPhone 15 Pro, which supposedly had a 48 MegaPixel camera. And yet, coin photography with the iPhone camera still wasn't great.

Old Photo Set-Up
The difficulty with my phone photos has been controlling the focus, as usually one part of the coin would be in focus, but the other parts out of focus. Focus Stacking (where multiple images are taken, at different focal lengths, then merged together) seemed like an ideal solution. I had been aware of Focus Stacking for some time, but could never find a good program on my phone to use; and when I had found a good program, I had no way to merge the images, unless I tried to do it manually.

Well, after leaving the matter for some time, I decided to do some digging again, and I think I have found a good solution. Using an iPhone, and a MacBook Air, there were two programs which seemed to work well. For the Phone, CameraPixels provides Focus Bracketing (the multiple images taken at different focal lengths) for up to 100 images. This could then be shared to my iCloud Drive, accessed on my Mac, and the images imported into the Focus Stacker app, which combines them together automatically. CameraPixels was only $8 for the full version (and not an annoying subscription service, thank god), and Focus Stacker was $15. So, $23 in total for what seems like a good photography solution is much better than the hundreds I thought I would have to invest in a Digital SLR.

CameraPixels free version, 3.1MPx limit.
There was still some Trial and Error. In my first test [Photo 1], I kept the length between the phone camera and the coin the same distance I would typically use with my digital camera and zoom in. I forgot that phone cameras don't have an optical zoom, so when doing this, it is still taking a photo from a distance, and simply cropping out the edges to make it look nearer. This doesn't work for Macro photography, and certainly did not take advantage of the iPhones Macro lens. I also made this mistake of not uploading all of the images, so there were fewer pictures to work with. So, my second test [Photo 2] used all 50 images that I had planned on using. This turned out much better, but still not great.

So, if 50 images made a better picture than 35, I decided to use all 100 images that CameraPixels could do, and ensure the coin was closer to the camera to make the proper use of the lens [Photo 3]. This was looking much better, but I still wasn't quite satisfied because it still looked a bit pixilated. After fiddling with the settings, I saw that the MegaPixel count was capped at 3.1. This was because I was using the free version of the program, and after upgrading to the paid version, the full 48 MegaPixels became available, so on to another test [Photo 4]. This was much better. The clarity that I wanted was available, and while I could probably get more with a DSLR, this was sufficient. My only problem now is figuring out a tripod and staging system that would make the pictures easier to edit.

My new attempt at a set-up for photography. A felt pad, legos to hold the coin, and small glass to hold the phone. A different color pad may be needed for silver coins.

The Progression of my Focus Stacking Tests

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