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09/02/2003 01:19:50 PM · #1 |
When shooting photos for the recent Past challenge I shot quite a few shots in B/W mode.
Is there a difference to shooting in B/W mode in camera as opposed to adjusting to greyscale or desaturating a color shot afterwards?
Any advantages/disadvantages either way?
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09/02/2003 01:28:04 PM · #2 |
| I find it's almost always better to convert to b&w in photoshop by using the Channel Mixer. This way, you can decide what percentage of your red, green and blue channels go into your new black and white image. Clouds look particuarly good in the red channel. It's like using a red filter with b&w film. Also, with my limited understanding (and I'm open to being corrected on this), black and white in-camera uses far less data than colour because each colour contains 256 levels of shade, so when you raise this to the power of 3, you have a lot of info! Black and white will only contain 256 shades. So the best thing to do is shoot in colour and then adjust your curves to make the most of your 256 to the power of 3 information THEN convert it. And what happens if you change your mind and decide you would have liked the original in colour? I think most would agree it is madness to shoot in black and white unless it's for a challenge like 'past' which I really hope we don't have again for exactly that reason. |
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09/02/2003 01:38:56 PM · #3 |
Thanks for the input Bob...gives me a starting point to play with
I always had that idea in the back of my mind about wanting to have to original in color but wanting to experiment more with b/w and being afraid of losing out on a great color shot by bein in b/w mode.
Thanks again.
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09/02/2003 01:39:51 PM · #4 |
Here's Google search results for the terms "tutorial channel mixer black and white photoshop"
Bunch of Links to Tutorials
Good luck!
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09/02/2003 03:07:55 PM · #5 |
| I stack a bunch of adjustment layers, usually a levels or curves for each color channel, then a hue adjust, then the desaturate layer, then a final levels or curves layer layer to adjust final contrast. That gives me plenty of sliders to work with. |
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09/02/2003 03:18:51 PM · #6 |
Originally posted by rickhd13:
. . . wanting to experiment more with b/w and being afraid of losing out on a great color shot by bein in b/w mode. |
Not that this is the subject of this thread but I made a comment similar to this to the photographer that is mentoring me locally and he told me that fearing that I'll miss a shot leads me to take shots quickly and jerkily or to compose a shot poorly. His sagacious advice was that I'm missing shots all the time. Sometimes I don't see them; sometimes I'm just not ready. Its not the shots that I miss but the shots that I take well that I'll appreciate and remember.
Having shared that little nugget, I'll say that I didn't understand why the DSLR's didn't come with all the cool filters built in for B&W or sepia or whatever at first. Now, I'm thrilled to be shooting everything in RAW and color and learning more and more about PS everyday and every challenge.
I don't know about anyone else but I found that to get a RAW image into sepia using PS is a pain. I ended up installing the PS-Elements cd that came with my camera just for this one function. I now use Elements to do some work with the color copies and then jump back into PS 7 to finish off the edit. My shots still look amateurish but I'm learning more and more about processing the images before I consider them "final".
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09/02/2003 04:31:17 PM · #7 |
I have found that this is a great link to video tutorials for Photoshop. There's really not anything on converting to black and white but I found it appropriate because there is a tutorial on using the Channel Mixer. This site has TONS of great information:
//www.apple.com/creative/resources/ttphotoshop/
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09/02/2003 07:38:36 PM · #8 |
If your camera has a RAW mode then you can shoot in BW but recover the colour info in the RAW file processing software so you will have both. You could then compare the results of different BW methods.
Message edited by author 2003-09-02 19:39:13.
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09/03/2003 09:28:05 AM · #9 |
Kevin - What I was referring to about missing out on a shot was that if I had in mind that I was going out today and shooting strictly in B/W mode, that I would surely miss a great color shot...
From what I have been reading lately, RAW seems to be the way to go and hopefully that will be a feature on the next camera I get
Thanks for the links to the tutorials...now to only find the time to put them to use...
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