I wanted to select the coins but the magic wand was useless and making a selection for each and every circle was not in my plan. Also painting circles in quick mask was time consuming. So- I made a circle selection over one of the coins then made a new empty layer over that with the empty selection active and filled the selection with black. Then using the move tool with the alt key pressed, I dragged a dupe of the black circle over each coin. the program put each one on it's own layer so the ones that needed to be tweaked with free transfor were easy to adjust.
When all the black circles were in place I collapsed all the circle layers. Now I had a clear background with filled black circles. Select the clear background with the magic wand and invert the selection.
Then highlight the layer with the photo of the coins, which now have the circle selection borders in place and do the control J thing to put the selected coins on a layer of their own. Pretty quick!