GRDI B/W vs PP

I see a lot of black and white images on the forum from the GRDI and wondered which is the best route to go with this. Do you set the camera to BW only, or take in colour and PP? I have been doing the latter as I can then adjust the "filters", but wondered what others thought.

My fear about going to just BW is that some other combination of the colour sliders would give a better result. However someone mentioned that they thought the native conversion was better than anything they got with PP.

Nick

You have read my mind, I've bought the other day a second hand GRD (I) and I was going to ask the same here...

I have a GRD2, my routine is as follows;

I set the GRD2's display to B/W, to "preview" the image in B/W, shoot in RAW/DNG and do the B/W conversion in Photoshop using THE ultimate B/W conversion plugin Nik Silver Efex Pro.

This allows for a) better image quality (start raw instead of jpeg) and b) more versitality for B/W conversion.

Examples on my Flickr page.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucdeschepper/

I found the b&w JPG engine of the GRD I to be so good that I never managed to do much better using RAW. Having a faster write time and less post processing work to do also means using the b&w JPG mode is a lot more convenient and saves time. The only processing I sometimes do to the JPGs is cropping and using USM.

On the GRD II, I have to process all images from RAW because the JPG engine is not very good so I use RAW there but if possible I just grab my GRD I if I plan on shooting b&w and use the JPGs.

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http://ricoh-gr-diary.blogspot.com/
http://ricohgrdiary.wordpress.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cristiansorega

VladimirV said:

I found the b&w JPG engine of the GRD I to be so good that I never
managed to do much better using RAW.

Click to expand...

Agreed ! - in fact the GRD is permanently in that mode, if I need Colour, the GX100 or one of the Canons do it better anyway

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--------> Adam-T

Please ignore the Typos, I'm the world's worst Typist

PentaxNick said:

take in colour and PP? I have been doing the
latter as I can then adjust the "filters"

Click to expand...

Yes...

The built-in BW conversion may be better than PS "convert to greyscale" in some instances? But I dont use that anyway, I use LR or Channel Mixer to get the results I want. The color vs bw files are no smaller off the camera so there's no reason to discard the chroma in camera.

you could take your pictures in B&W jpeg with RAW. That way if you are unhappy with the BW results you can PP the raw file which will be colour

Richie2Rich said:

you could take your pictures in B&W jpeg with RAW. That way if you> are unhappy with the BW results you can PP the raw file which will be> colour

Click to expand...

The main problem with this approach is the hour or two (subjective) it takes to save the image before I can use the camera again.

Nick