B&W and digital?

Martin Taylor

Martin Taylor

Member
When shooting B&W with a digital camera, is it preferable to set the camera to B&W mode, or to shoot colour and then convert to monochrome in, say, Photoshop?
 
I suppose te key word here is "preferable"
It isn't really that ba an idea shooting b&w in camera, the gf1 gives you the ability to change contrast etc and give fairly ok results!
As Larry puts it though, you are giving the job of post process to an unknown far eastern computer programmer though ... If you are happy with the results then it means ou don't have to fadf about on the computer after! In which case, for some this might be a preference for te fact it saves time!

For me, shoot colour then convert!
Shooting colour then converting saves the colour data meaning that when converting to b&w there is a lot more you can do to the image to get a nicer b&w image

For eg, in the days of film, it was common to use a red filter to make the blue sky look more dark in the b&w image ...
These days this can be done using digital pp when having started with a colour image, but not a b&w jpeg
In lightroom, there are specific sliders the control the levels of colour within a b&w image

With a bit of luck, someone might pop in and explain some techniques on using Photoshop to get good mono images!
I still think you should get your self lightroom though! ;)
 
Thanks guys, looks like I'll leave the camera in colour mode then. I had thought there might be some issues with reduced noise in B&W mode, but perhaps I was thinking of film.

I've just seen the price of Lightroom and I'll pass for the moment as I get Photoshop free from work :)
 
You should be able to get it cheap through the school! Student discount makes it £65 I think, for that it's a no brainer
Anyway, I shouldn't keep harping on I'll en up sounding like another forum owner and a certain turn table ... Mind you, you know how right he was there! ;)
 
Ooh, I think the school may be buying that for me - for educational purposes, of course!
 
Good man! I know you will love it!
You know where we are when/if you need any help!

Don't forget to switch that camera to raw! ;)
 
Hamish Gill said:
Don't forget to switch that camera to raw! ;)
Click to expand...

I just experimented with RAW for the first time, opening the file in Photoshop. Complicated, isn't it? I can see the quality against JPG, but on the downside there's more noise to deal with. Getting the optimum settings is going to take some time. Is there a beginner's guide to RAW I can read?
 
It's easier in lightroom Martin, you wouldn't know you are shooting raw in lightroom really it makes no difference to how the program works ...
More noise, but more detail as the in built noise reduction in the joeg conversion isn't applied ... Having that not applied means you get to choose your own balance between noise and detail ... One of the many advantages of raw shooting!
 
Hamish Gill said:
As Larry puts it though, you are giving the job of post process to an unknown far eastern computer programmer though ... If you are happy with the results then it means ou don't have to fadf about on the computer after! In which case, for some this might be a preference for te fact it saves time!

For me, shoot colour then convert!
Click to expand...

Larry further says, that it is a lot easier to take colour out, than put it in. Back in working days, I got a call from a country-star's PR agency in Nashville with an assignment to do some fresh hand-out pictures of him and his band. He had changed some of his personnel and needed some B&W shots. So I met him at a performance, armed with my M3 and Tri-X to shoot live as he is playing.

I got the shots with the band, but I also shot a few of him at the mic. One in particular, he considered the best performance shot ever done of him and his wife, road manager, and probably his saddle pony and collie dog agreed. I got a call from the creative director of his record company a few days later, saying that everyone thought it should be the cover shot for his next album—needed in LA in three days.

"No problem, I will ship off a print this afternoon"

"...in colour."

"Oooooopppps! Umm... that will take a bit longer."

I dashed out to the top art supply house in town and bought the best airbrush in stock. Printed a large stack on matte paper and began learning. 48 hours later a print was on its way to California—and I went to bed for the first time since the phone call. It took that long to get enough control of the brush to produce an acceptable print.

The album shipped double platinum. It was the best selling country album that year, large posters were made of the cover, and in every store I went by for months. Finally, it was named the Country Music Album of the Year and seen by bazillions of people world wide. The price was many times more than I had ever received for a single shot and I earned every penny—and business from the music industry increased dramatically.

And I nearly blew it by shooting B&W!

After that, any B&W gig was shot with colour negative film and printed on Panalure, which was a lovely panchromatic B&W paper. It had the added benefit, that one could use any B&W filter on the enlarger after the fact.

Not infrequently, I would hand the client the prints from a shoot, see a look of grief on his face and hear "Damn! I wish I had assigned these in colour!"

I would answer, "I can give you colour. I shot it in colour." This would be followed by client/photographer bonding rituals too arcane to describe in a forum such as this.

That ended B&W shooting for me forever. With colour negatives, not only could I provide B&W prints, but also fully colour corrected chromes using Vericolour Print film—and I could do it all in-house.

With a bit of luck, someone might pop in and explain some techniques on using Photoshop to get good mono images!
I still think you should get your self lightroom though!
Click to expand...

Now, Photoshop CS5 has a number of ways to B&W, including the HSL tab in ACR. It allows one to do very sensitive filtration in the process, not only traditional filtering but selective lightening or darkening of eight bands of hue. Once open in Photoshop, there is the Channel Mixer that has been around forever, but also a dedicated Black&White conversion adjustment, with a bunch of presets, plus fine-tuning controls. For quick&dirty, hit Shift+Ctrl+U to simply desaturate.

In Photoshop, ACR lets one open multiple instances of an exposure and layer them. In colour photography, this allows one to easily correct for multiple incompatible light sources and blend them seamlessly together with easy to use layer masks. Shooting on a hazy day, every bit of faint blue in the sky can be darkened to look like a Polariod filter, even if shot in the wrong directly. The landscape shot in a distance can have its contrast enhanced and blended with the normal foreground, changing a weak, washed out landscape into something that looks normal and right. Dodging and burning using layers is often far easier and more effective than using dodging and burning brushes. Opening up shadows can reveal unwanted noise. With a shadow layer, noise can be dealt with easily just in the shadows, without smearing the rest of the image.

With B&W, one can vary the contrast and exposure area by area and again blend seamlessly. Putting a subject in colour in a monochrome environment can be very effective if not overused, and again practically a no brainer to do with layers.

Anyone who is not fluent with the power of layers, is squandering most of Photoshop's (or Paint Shop Pro's) power and versatility. For me, layers are the fundamental tool.
 
Thank you for that, Larry. Plenty to think about. I am but a beginner with layers but I will persevere.

I'm intrigued - what was the album you shot the cover for?
 
Nice one Larry!
And yeah, I'm also intrigued!

Most of that sounds confusing to me btw Martin! Although I'm sure I could work it out quite quickly with Photoshop in font of me ... Not wanting to sound like a broken record, but lightroom makes that sort of thing a lot easier! Ok you don't have the layering, but you still have the Hue saturation and luminance controls in colour mode and a specific set of controls in a separate b&w mode!
 
Martin Taylor said:
Thank you for that, Larry. Plenty to think about. I am but a beginner with layers but I will persevere.

I'm intrigued - what was the album you shot the cover for?
Click to expand...

I was fortunate enough to meet, spend time with, and photograph many of the key people in the arts, sports and politics of the mid- to late-20th century, that I have grown allergic to name-dropping. It was a consequence of my choice of career and it can sound like I was just shooting shots of a bunch of my buddies, rather than photographing these people as part of my job.

In this case it was Don Williams, and the album was "I Believe in You." The year was around 1982 give or take one.
 
Hamish Gill said:
Nice one Larry!
And yeah, I'm also intrigued!

Most of that sounds confusing to me btw Martin! Although I'm sure I could work it out quite quickly with Photoshop in font of me ... Not wanting to sound like a broken record, but lightroom makes that sort of thing a lot easier! Ok you don't have the layering, but you still have the Hue saturation and luminance controls in colour mode and a specific set of controls in a separate b&w mode!
Click to expand...

As we photographers view a scene, we do so with one of the worst lenses in the field. As young people with perfect 20:20 vision, in fact only the few degrees in the centre of the image our brain receives would get an "Excellent" rating from a lens tester, and then only in very good light. As we move from the centre, the fall-off toward the edges of our vision would receive an "Not Acceptable" from the most forgiving of reviewers. Our eyes scan and our brains stitch the images together into a perception of sharpness. At the same time, our brain applies white-balance every degree our eyes move.

Film cameras placed the image on a curve that had sort of an organic feel. Digital cameras are extremely linear, and only capture that which actually exists. They are literal to a fault. This is great for scientific instrumentation, but lousy for expressing the feelings, emotions and messages of actual photography.

My first lesson in photography was from my mother who said shoot with the light coming over your right shoulder—box Brownie and Verichrome film. No idea where she picked that up, but in fact she was right. Flat light with a minimum of shadow is the easiest thing to reproduce. Also the most boring. Lightroom handles it perfectly as long as you always pick a non-challenging day with no mixed conditions, that ACR can handle with a single image.

Ignore it and welcome to blocked shadows, blown highlights, colour casts and all the other ills of ambient light shooting. When I am into lighting conditions that would indicate an afternoon in a real-ale pub with a working cooler, would be the wiser choice, I have a tendency to shoot. I love the challenge of making the impossible look ordinary—except for photographers who are baffled about how such a shot could possibly be made—and still tell the story, elicit the emotions or deliver the message. However, for all viewers, the edge is embedded in the shot. A tight-rope walker is most effective when walking looks effortless. Everyone in the crowd knows it is not and places themselves on the rope. Same is the wonder of photography.
 
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Pete Askew said:
Lucky he didn't have a star-burst design on his guitar there Larry!! Nice anecdote a great write-up as usual.

http://www.chartstats.com/art.php?type=album&id=5072

1980.
Click to expand...

Yup, that is it! A star-burst would not have been a problem. The background B&W image was providing the luminance, while the air-brush was applying the colour. Very much like working in Lab Colour Mode in Photoshop.

In discussing the cover design, I suggested sort of old-tymie type and a surround of burlap. It looks like they scanned the back of a piece of carpet. I did all the prints in an oval frame as was used in the cover—I left them no choice. Had the Internet existed back then, we could have worked interactively on the cover design, but it came pretty close to what I could describe on the phone. Burlap would have been more organic, but this worked too.
 
Fantastic! I cannot imagine how much you sweated over that airbrushing but the outcome is superb.
 
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