X10 b&W photography

this thread to try to collect b&w tips for the x10. now it is quite difficult to find such info in this forum through the search field.

as mentioned before i am (still) a very happy x10'er. somehow it revived my interest in photography in different ways. one of them being taking b&w pics again. i did this a long time ago in dark room with film and enjoyed it a lot. with my previous digital camera i only used b&w when i was in a situation where coulour pics would've looked too dreadful.

some time ago i read a post (in one of the fuji forums) from someone who had done some tests with highlight and shadowtone settings, combined with different DR settings. one of the conclusions was that it is possible to obtain very contrasty images without loss of detail by combining hard settings for shadow and highlights with DR400%.

this indeed works very well. i would not immediatley thought of testing this. it is a very useful tip and indicative of the strength of this forum.

now i have my C2 setting as follows :

- A mode with aperture standard at f6.4 and manual focus. mostly shoot at 28mm. never have to focus.

- iso AUTO3200 : before it was 6400 to obtain more grainy images. but in a lot of situations the scene is simply too bright. it also excludes use of DR.

- M 16:9 : previous cam had native 16:9 sensor and i've gotten used to the format. M to allow the exr DR to work.

- dynamic range 400% : for the above mentioned reasons

- sharpness SOFT : took this over from my PASM settings.

- film simulation B : standard b&w.

- highlight tone HARD : for above reasons. bright highlights, but dr400 retains detail.

- shadow tone M-HARD : the hard setting i found too harsh. especially with interior shots this resulted in too big too dark areas in the image. outside hard works better, but when trees/bushes involved they also soon became too dark with very little (or hard to discern) detail.

- noise reduction LOW : also took this over from my PASM settings.

i wanted to add some pictures ( that at least i was happy about) but again having trouble uploading images to dpr.

but not so important... goal of this post is to get other x10'ers who use b&w to share their settings and if possible why.

anyone have any experience with the other b&w modes (yellow, green, red filter)?

ps : i know a lot of people consider using b&w setting in-camera as "dumb" because one can control this much better in some PP application. but goal here is to have the b&w images to be as good as possible sooc. this also allows to see/judge them immediately after taking the shot and adjust if necessary.