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Black and white resolution

A

arkamw

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 5, 2004
Messages
1,391
OK. It's been touched on lightly before but I need more specifcs from people who know.

When taking digital pictures and I want them to be black and white, is it better to set the camera to b&w or use software to change everything to greyscale?

Using the software, I would think that there are more possible b&w gradiations that can be determined because of the color information for each pixel. I think Leo (TechTV) had said this, but can't remember.

However, when taking b&w pics, it's almost like the camera increases resolution because I think the pics turn out more "sharp." I'm wrong, the resolution stays the same, but it just seems that way. Psychological maybe?

Does anyone have experience or opinons on this?

Cheers.
 
I prefer to shoot in color and conver it to B&W later. You can always conver a color image to B&W, but you can't convert a B&W image back to color if you wanted to.
 
I love the two minute response.

So you don't think camera's add anything to b&w only images? Maybe by cutting color info it doesn't have to interpolate as much on the .jpg saves? Thus it's able to render a better picture?

Cheers.
 
arkamw said:
I love the two minute response.

So you don't think camera's add anything to b&w only images? Maybe by cutting color info it doesn't have to interpolate as much on the .jpg saves? Thus it's able to render a better picture?

Cheers.
Click to expand...


No...
 
I too always convert in Photoshop. I guess you could shoot in B&W mode if you use the display and need help "seeing" things in shades of grey. I'll be honest, a color display has corrupted me. After four years of doing photojournalism, I think I was beginning to see things in black and white. Now, it's just not quite the same.
 
I don't know if this helps, but most dSLRs do not have a black and white option. this might indicate that doing a black and white conversion in post production is preferred to in-camera black and white conversion.

black and white conversion in camera is just for people who want black and white photos but don't have the software to convert to black and white.
 
I think that it is better to take color pics and then convert to black and white. The conversion is easy - simply de-saturate the image. But with a color image, you can do all sorts of neat tricks to make interesting grayscale pictures that you'd never do if you started with a B&W image.


As for why the image appears sharper, it could be that the camera does some unsharp-mask to the image? Or maybe your camera doesn't have a great CCD for getting colors, and using it in black & white mode covers up its flaws?

An experiment. Maybe take a test picture in color, and your camera's black and white mode. Then use some photo-software to desaturate the color image, and compare that to the camera's B&W image?
 
depends, if you want to spend time in photoshop or something similar, take color, if not b&w.

with the color image you can do all sorts of fun channel mixing to the final b&w. Red channel more interesting than green/blue? use that, or make it 60% of the final image, etc.

There are various tutorials on the web on how to do it, as well as how to make fake "infrared" images.
 
[TQ] said:
No...
Click to expand...

Well, that about sums it up...

Tim_Axe said:
An experiment. Maybe take a test picture in color, and your camera's black and white mode. Then use some photo-software to desaturate the color image, and compare that to the camera's B&W image?
Click to expand...

I have thought about doing this but have been too lazy to do a serious comparison. I think that I am going to have to do that now, though consensus seems to be against letting the camera do the work.

ambientZ said:
There are various tutorials on the web on how to do it
Click to expand...

Any ones that you like in particular??

Thanks for the replies.

Cheers.
 
If you have PS i think this method is by far the best, and it also reinforces the idea that shooting color is best.

I wrote this thread but it is not my own creation. I got it off of a site where the guy does it via video, the video however is extreamly sarcastic and rather annoying, but the information provided is fantastic. None of that matters though as i dont really have the link.


If you've got PS check it out.
http://www.photography-on-the.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=36406&highlight=black+white
 
Desaturation, basically.


It's a process I've been using for about a yr now, even since the Adobe Photoshop CS.pdf touched on it. Just a better alternative to "Convert to Greyscale". By doing so, it also prevents the degradation of tones and half-tones when being saved in JPEG compression.

That way, it's still on a 16-bit or 24-bit color-scale (just desaturated), as-opposed to a 256 greys color-scale
 
And can I just say that it yields some fantastic results. I played around with it for a few minutes today and I was amazed at the results. Using this method, I think I can safely say that every pic will be taken in color from now on.

Again, something that Photoshop can do that I would have had no idea about. I've been converting to grayscale for years.

Cheers.
 
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