B&W/in camera or photoshop?

This may be a silly question but here goes...

I have a D-Lux3 and, yes, I love B&W. Is there a quality difference between shooting in B&W versus shooting in Color and then using Photoshop to go B&W afterwards?

I do B&W in PS. I always shoot in color, this way in the future I have the option to have either color or B&W.

I use the lab color method or calculations method to convert my photos to B&W in PS, this way I have ultimate control of my tones.

If you shoot RAW color, then you have a lot more latitude for getting the B&W look you want later in PS. And you can redo it whenever you change your mind. With in-camera B&W (I assume jpeg) you're kind of stuck with what the camera gives you (which isn't necessarily a bad thing).

Of course B&W conversion in PS requires a lot more work.

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~ Kent ~
Look with the eyes, see with the soul.
http://www.kent-media.com/

If your D-Lux 3 is like my D-Lux 2 you can set the LCD monitor to display in B&W. So even when your shooting Raw you can think in B&W and not be distracted by the colors. It works really well like this. So as far as you could tell while your shooting you would think your shooting in B&W JPG, but you are really shooting in RAW and the LCD displays only B&W when you set it up like this.

Of course at anytime you can just change the LCD back to displaying color for Raw and JPG's.
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With my Digilux 2 I have found that B&W in camera is smoother and "creamier" than with PS. More if a 1950's look and feel. Have not tried it with the DLUX 3 yet. But I am NOT disappointed with the B&W pictures I get from DLUX 3 using PS. And like it has been said before, that saves your color originals should you change your mind later.

John Crawley
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wordsandsuch/show/

“Let there be light.” It all began right there.

B&W photography when using digital capture is a rendering process ... the sensor always captures a full spectrum image, how you render it to a finished photograph is all that separates "shooting in color" vs B&W.

With some cameras, you can set the camera to automatically render a B&W image for you. Depending upon the camera, you have some control over what settings it uses to do that and the results might be satisfactory to you. But once done what you have from the camera are JPEG images which have lost a great deal of information, which makes further processing much more restrictive.

Who cares if the results are satisfactory out of the camera? ;-) If the camera's display shows the B&W rendering, it might aid you in making decisions about what to photograph. Or might not.

For my B&W, I capture in RAW format and do the rendering in image processing. My eyes are used to seeing a color world through the viewfinder and selectively tell me what is there in B&W, so I don't find a B&W rendering in camera very useful. With the RAW data, I can work both color and B&W renderings of a scene, a little bit of post-visualization, and see where it takes me as I work with it. With the RAW data, I can apply traditional B&W filtering to the image data to adjust and separate gray tones of differently colored things, push the rendering around with a great deal of control and finesse.

The Leica Digilux3 (and it's L1 sibling) have a fairly versatile B&W in-camera rendering engine for JPEGs. And save the full RAW data as well when you turn on the RAW capture facility. If you turn on the B&W rendering, that's what shows on the LCD in Live View while the optical viewfinder shows the normal color view of a scene. So it becomes the best of both worlds: you can capture both a tailored B&W JPEG image AND the full RAW dataset, and you can view normally or with a B&W translation on the image per your B&W rendering setup. It's amazing how versatile this camera is... !

Godfrey
http://www.gdgphoto.com



Great Egret - Guadalupe River Park 2007
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