# B&W digital camera settings?



## Kernix (Aug 20, 2009)

I have a Canon digital Rebel XTi and I want to shoot some cityscapes in black & white. I set the Picture Style to Monochrome with settings of 3, 0, R, N (that's sharpness, contrast, filter effect [Red] and toning effect [None]). Was wondering if anyone can shoots with different settings and why.

Thanks!


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## Big Mike (Aug 20, 2009)

The most common (and best IMO) advice is to shoot in Color (RAW) and convert to B&W with Photoshop or other software.


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## Kernix (Aug 20, 2009)

That's what I'm hearing from other people - thanks!


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## Goontz (Aug 20, 2009)

Agreed; shoot in color and do any B&W work in PP. This is also good because that way you're not stuck w/ a B&W version of a shot if it would otherwise work better in color.


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## icassell (Aug 20, 2009)

B/W out of the camera, to my eye, never looks as good as careful B/W done in Photoshop.  As previously mentioned, you also have the full data-set to play with that you lose if you shoot in B/W.

There are a couple of great books out there on the topic.  Here is one that I like:

Amazon.com: Advanced Digital Black & White Photography (A Lark Photography Book) (9781600592102): John Beardsworth: Books

Here's another good one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1598633759/ref=ox_ya_oh_product


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## Garbz (Aug 21, 2009)

The settings you have are extremely limiting. You have played with the red effect I assume? It darkens the sky a bit and brings out people's skin tones. Great when photographing people but not much else. There are plenty of times when you would want to mimic a blue or green filter.

In such cases it's always good to shoot colour and convert using your favourite software. Every software worth it's salt should give you some kind of option for blending the various red green and blue channels to grey.


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## Battou (Aug 21, 2009)

When shooting for B&W, in addition to what has been already said about shooting in color and converting, Shoot with the mind set of B&W. Don't think convertion, Think that you have B&W film in the camera. It's harder than it sounds especially when shooting digital but it helps with composing, color positioning, lighting and other compositional elements as they are slightly different than in color. I have too often seen when people are thinking color, shooting in color then try converting later and have crappy conversion results and can't understand why.


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## table1349 (Aug 21, 2009)

Battou said:


> When shooting for B&W, in addition to what has been already said about shooting in color and converting, Shoot with the mind set of B&W. Don't think convertion, Think that you have B&W film in the camera. It's harder than it sounds especially when shooting digital but it helps with composing, color positioning, lighting and other compositional elements as they are slightly different than in color. I have too often seen when people are thinking color, shooting in color then try converting later and have crappy conversion results and can't understand why.



Good advise, but hard to do for most people these days since most new shooters at least don't have black and white film experience.  After 35 years of shooting I can turn on black and white any time I want.  I sure shot enough cases if not truck loads of B&W film over the years.  I doubt that a digital only shooter can envision black and white with out having that experience.  This is just one more reason that I advocate that anyone that wants to learn photography ought to have some film experience.  It teaches a different mindset.


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## ann (Aug 22, 2009)

ahmen to the above statement


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## flea77 (Aug 22, 2009)

Agreed! The best, and easiest way to make a B&W image is with B&W film.

Allan


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## table1349 (Aug 22, 2009)

flea77 said:


> Agreed! The best, and easiest way to make a B&W image is with B&W film.
> 
> Allan



I'm not sure I would call it the easiest.  It takes a knowledge and possession of a vast array of filters to shoot B&W film.  Glass filters that are not needed for digital and are much easier and cheaper to duplicate in post processing.  Film is the best way however to learn to think and train your brain to see in black and white.


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## Dwig (Aug 23, 2009)

I disagree with the idea that learning B&W is best done with film. I see absolutely no advantage over using a digital camera that has a B&W mode. To me, its seems no advantage either way.

The supposed advantage of film is, I presume, that you never see the photograph in color and, once shot, the conversion of the subject color into B&W tones is fixed. If you shoot B&W JPEG with very normal settings and no filter effect (not the red the OP is using) you have pretty much the same thing as shooting B&W film. For the real beginner, this is where you should start. As you develop an eye for "seeing" in B&W you can progress to more advanced techniques.

For the serious shooter, shooting either B&W film with no collection of filters or shooting B&W JPEG w/o electronic filter ajustment is not optimal. To do good film work you need filters. To do good digital you need the electronic equivalent of the same. You to change your camera settings on a shot for shot basis. With digital, by far the best way to do this is to shoot RAW (which is always color) and do the B&W conversion in post processing to make the "filter" and tonal adjustments (contrast, ...) necessary.


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## icassell (Aug 23, 2009)

gryphonslair99 said:


> flea77 said:
> 
> 
> > Agreed! The best, and easiest way to make a B&W image is with B&W film.
> ...




Interesting thought .... I'm curious, since I never shot in film and processed in digital ... My B/W film imaging was in the day where everything was done in the darkroom ...

In this era where alot of film shooters do their printing digitally, do you still need an array of filters if you shoot B/W film?  Can you shoot B/W film without filters and then add the filters in Photoshop successfully?


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## ann (Aug 23, 2009)

your correct, with digital there is no need to use a variety of filters, however, that does not mean that one should not be thinking in black and white terms when shooting with digital .

the post processing process gives one a variety of tools when converting, but it also takes an understanding of what your vision is before  you fire the shutter.


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## table1349 (Aug 23, 2009)

icassell said:


> gryphonslair99 said:
> 
> 
> > flea77 said:
> ...



My question would be why would someone be mixing the two mediums.  I have yet to see a scanned negative image that has the same amount of detail that the negative did.  Close, but not all.  If I shoot film, which I very rarely do these days, I still have a dark room that I can use.  I just don't choose to maintain a dark room these days.    

To answer your question though, it could be done technically.  But with out the experience, would the shooter have an idea of what they were trying to do in the first place or are they just swagging around in the digital trying to find what they like.


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## icassell (Aug 23, 2009)

gryphonslair99 said:


> To answer your question though, it could be done technically.  But with out the experience, would the shooter have an idea of what they were trying to do in the first place or are they just swagging around in the digital trying to find what they like.



Well, I still have my 35mm camera and lenses, but the filters are long gone ... rather than re-invest, I was wondering how it would work out if I tried the digital processing route.  As for why someone would want to mix media, that is done not only in photography.  It can be interesting and fun at times.  As for me, I have a fair amount of 35mm glass still, but there is no way I can set up a darkroom in my current life ...


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## table1349 (Aug 23, 2009)

icassell said:


> gryphonslair99 said:
> 
> 
> > To answer your question though, it could be done technically.  But with out the experience, would the shooter have an idea of what they were trying to do in the first place or are they just swagging around in the digital trying to find what they like.
> ...



Yeah it can be done, and in most cases quite easily.  I have a set of Photosphop plugins call 55MM. It is a virtually a whole set of film day filters plugin actions.  The color filters work very well.  The Polarizer and ND plugins suck.


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## Dwig (Aug 23, 2009)

icassell said:


> ...Can you shoot B/W film without filters and then add the filters in Photoshop successfully?



Of course not. The filters operate by selecting a portion of the spectrum, in the case of colored filters, or a portion of the light of a particular polarized orientation, in the case of a polarizer. In either case, once the image is recorded on the B&W film that information is lost.

The only way to shoot film, scan, and apply effects to substitute for the classic B&W filters (#25 red, #8 yellow, ...) is to shoot color film, scan in color, and convert the color image into B&W adjusting the conversion to replicate the effect of a colored filter. I've done this on occasion, though the only new images I do it with are those that I shoot in an old stereo camrea. The only other time I do it is when scanning old family images where the original color image has shifted in color and/or faded so much that a good color image can't be achieved.


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## icassell (Aug 23, 2009)

Dwig said:


> icassell said:
> 
> 
> > ...Can you shoot B/W film without filters and then add the filters in Photoshop successfully?
> ...



This doesn't exactly make sense to me.  If you shoot in B/W film with no filters, aren't you getting ALL the info on the film that you can remove later by the use of digital filters?  It's not as though glass filters ADD information to B/W, but rather subtract it (if I understand things correctly).  I still have my polarizers and ND's , but somehow managed to misplace my colored filters (yellow, red, etc.) in one of my many moves since my B/W film days.  Admittedly, these filters are now pretty cheap used at my local haunt, but just wondering ...


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## Dwig (Aug 23, 2009)

icassell said:


> This doesn't exactly make sense to me.  If you shoot in B/W film with no filters, aren't you getting ALL the info on the film ...



You are getting all of the light. The information that is lost is what portion of the light striking any one point was any one particular color. You can't apply a filter to darken things that were blue (e.g. simulate a Wratten #25 red used to darken skys) when you can't tell what objects in the image were blue.

True, a human operator will recognize sky as sky and you can manually darken it, but this is tedious when leaves and branches are in the way. No automatic filter can do it.

Also, even with digital, there is value to using some of the old film filters. A #25 red will darken a bluish sky _before_ the light strikes the sensor. Attempting to simulate this later in PP can be successful, but only if the bright sky isn't so bright that the sensor clips (fails to record the bright data). Filtering the camera reduces the likelyhood of the sky clipping.


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## table1349 (Aug 23, 2009)

Dwig said:


> icassell said:
> 
> 
> > ...Can you shoot B/W film without filters and then add the filters in Photoshop successfully?
> ...



Actually Dwig is right.  Sorry I misread the post and was thinking of color negatives scanned and then converted to B&W.  That can be done with channel mixing.   With a black and white image there is no color information to be had to apply a filter effect to.


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