Re: Digital B&W photography

Diverse Art wrote: 
Cheryl Harms wrote:


There are a couple of ways you could do it.The first step would be to do
the thing no one likes to do...read your owners manual and you should find
instructions on how to change to b&w settings on your camera menu. The
second way is to shoot in color then either use the desaturate or
grayscale commands in Photoshop.



I'm not sure the D-70 has a mono setting. And there are better ways of
getting B&W in Photoshop than simply reducing saturation to 0 or switching
to greyscale (both of which tend to result in rather dull, low-contrast
images). There are lots of tutorials around for this, but one of the best,
and simplest, ways is to use the channel mixer. Because you are,
effectively, modifying the response of the red, green and blue channels
individually, you can mimic the effect not just of different types of B&W
film (including a kind of pseudo-infrared) but also the effect of different
filters. As an example, if you reduce the blue channel considerably, this
is like having a red filter - everything containing a lot of blue,
including clear skies, gets darker.

The great advantage is that you can shoot in colour and then you have
complete choice over how you want to represent the image later.

I'd also highly recommend PhotoKit which includes a whole bunch of
photographic effects including various colour to B&W conversions.


From my own experience with this, you're better off taking the picture in color, then changing it to b&w later in Photoshop. You can manipulate and optimize each color channel to get the best b&w result. If you just shoot in b&w, you just get a bland picture with no options.
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Digital B&W photography
    ... >> grayscale commands in Photoshop. ... > images). ... > effectively, modifying the response of the red, green and blue channels ... > is like having a red filter - everything containing a lot of blue, ...
    (alt.photography)
  • Re: Digital B&W photography
    ... > grayscale commands in Photoshop. ... images). ... effectively, modifying the response of the red, green and blue channels ... is like having a red filter - everything containing a lot of blue, ...
    (alt.photography)