I saw a great article in the latest version of Digital Photo Pro magazine. This month is their B&W Special and they are looking at different aspects of black & white photography including capture, processing, and output. One thing that I thought was interesting was the article on shooting in b&w, otherwise known as Monochrome in some cameras. This has some great advantages. First of all, if you set your camera to Monochrome, your photographs will appear on the rear screen as black and white images. Most dSLR cameras will also let you apply filtration to the image in-camera, just as if you were using traditional color filters with black and white film. So here’s the problem with shooting in the Monochrome mode, if you are shooting with JPEG set as your file type, the image will remains b&w, but if you like shooting RAW, then your images will remain color. This is because RAW files don’t have any processing applied to them like JPEGs do so, while the image on the back of the LCD preview will appear b&w, the RAW file will look like a standard color image when opened in your RAW processing software.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because you then have the ability to apply the b&w processing as you please. If you simply shoot in JPEG, you will get the b&w image that you see on the LCD but you lose the ability to change the b&w processing so what you see is all that you will get. That’s not always bad but it can limit your processing options. This is where I picked up a really cool tip from DPP magazine. Instead of choosing between the RAW and JPEG formats, why not just shoot both? Most new dSLR cameras allow you to shoot in both RAW and JPEG simultaneously. This means that you get that nice b&w image that was processed by the camera and saved as a JPEG as well as a RAW file that you can process yourself. I’m definitely going to give this a try the next time I set out to shoot some b&w images.
Captured in RAW and processed in Nik Silver Efex Pro
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Awesome tonal range in your image, Jeff.