To shoot or not to shoot Black & White....

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Eric1977

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Robin
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Hi,

I used to shoot a lot of my pictures either in colour or black and white depending on what I wanted. However, since shooting in RAW, and the fact that my Mac changes B&W pictures to colour anyway, I started wonder, what is the point!

Surely, with PS nowadays it makes more sense to shoot all your pictures in colour and then convert when necessary?

Any thoughts, guidance or preferences on this?

Thanks.
 
I would always shoot in colour and convert to B&W in the computer as you have more information to play with, and more options, during the conversion.

As you have found, with shooting in RAW you can choose a B&W Picture Style/Control in camera, but that is ignored by your RAW processing software. Some people like the B&W picture in camera however to help them in visualising how their B&W images may be like. Some people can do that in their heads.
 
Eric1977 said:
Hi,

However, since shooting in RAW, and the fact that my Mac changes B&W pictures to colour anyway.
Click to expand...

The Mac changes nothing by the way. The raw image is always in colour and you may just be looking at a B+W rendition of it on you camera. Yout would need to shoot in raw and jpeg to see the B+W image.

Not worth doing anyway as the camera wil just give a basic B+W image whereas you may prefer more contrast, more black etc, to get what you want.
 
i would always shoot in colour a pp software makes it so easy to convert to b&w. and colour gives you more to play about with before converting
 
Yip. The raw file stores all the colour information, and you can convert the image to B & W in various ways during post processing if you want to. I can't see any advantage in using a monochrome setting in camera but the option's there if you want it.
 
Another for raw and set the camera to B&W so that I can get an idea of what the B&W looks like.


(A bit picky I know but the raw file is not a colour file. The colour is "created" in the raw converter using Bayer Interpolation. Therefore using different raw converters can produce different colours)
 
Thanks Kev. I guess it comes back around to preference and whether you have the time (and you remembering) to switch settings... :)

Plus I guess as long as you are happy with the conversion in your photo editing software.
 
Eric1977 said:
Plus I guess as long as you are happy with the conversion in your photo editing software.
Click to expand...

You should be happier with the conversion as you are doing it. In camera B+W is usually a pretty basic conversion whereas when converting yourself you do much, much more than just press the convert to B+W button don't you? (unless using a preset in Silver Efex or the like)
 
Most cameras include editing "features", they're put there because they're included in iPhones or compact cameras for technophobes and when said technophobes get the idea that they're suddenly going to become professional photographers, they buy a DSLR and expect all those silly effects to be there in the menus. I swear it won't be long before DSLRs have an instagram button........

Anything beyond the basic "bread and butter" DSLR stuff, is all doable in PP, if you have the software and know what your doing.
 
Personally, I always shoot in colour - many years of shooting B&W taught me to see in B&W terms so I can shoot with the intent to convert to mono fairly well. Since I always shoot in JPEG rather than raw, I stay in colour mode since very often a shot shot with a mono conversion in mind works very well in colour and it's rather harder to saturate a mono shot than it is to desaturate a full colour one.

Rather than do a simple desaturation though, I usually use the channel mixer when converting so I can play with alternative conversions. In fact, I often use the PSE B&W tools (PSE8 IIRC) to do a basic conversion using one of its presets but fiddle with the sliders to my heart's content!
 
Nod said:
Personally, I always shoot in colour - many years of shooting B&W taught me to see in B&W terms so I can shoot with the intent to convert to mono fairly well. Since I always shoot in JPEG rather than raw, I stay in colour mode since very often a shot shot with a mono conversion in mind works very well in colour and it's rather harder to saturate a mono shot than it is to desaturate a full colour one.

Rather than do a simple desaturation though, I usually use the channel mixer when converting so I can play with alternative conversions. In fact, I often use the PSE B&W tools (PSE8 IIRC) to do a basic conversion using one of its presets but fiddle with the sliders to my heart's content!
Click to expand...

I go along with that. I started photography when I was growing up in the 60s and couldn't afford colour film, so I only shot B & W for years. I can still visualise a scene in monochrome without thinking about it very much.

There are quite a few ways to convert images to monochrome, as you say. I don't do this very often, but I just try various options and see which result I like best if I want to play with it. I've been meaning to get some B & W film and wet print the images one of these days too.
 
I found this video quite interesting. It shows his thought process for the shots and how he pre-prepared it for the editing process.
 
Shoot raw decide later.
 
One vote for shooting b&w in camera is for when you don't want to do extensive post processing and are fairly happy with the results from the camera.
 
shoot in colour, convert later as you convert how you want and not how it wants to. The other option is to shoot RAW + JPG as the RAW will be colour and you get a JPG in B&W (with possibly a filter simulation applied in custom profiles)
 
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