B&W digital camera settings?

[icassell]

To answer your question though, it could be done technically. But with out the experience, would the shooter have an idea of what they were trying to do in the first place or are they just swagging around in the digital trying to find what they like.

Well, I still have my 35mm camera and lenses, but the filters are long gone ... rather than re-invest, I was wondering how it would work out if I tried the digital processing route. As for why someone would want to mix media, that is done not only in photography. It can be interesting and fun at times. As for me, I have a fair amount of 35mm glass still, but there is no way I can set up a darkroom in my current life ...

 

[table1349]

To answer your question though, it could be done technically. But with out the experience, would the shooter have an idea of what they were trying to do in the first place or are they just swagging around in the digital trying to find what they like.

Well, I still have my 35mm camera and lenses, but the filters are long gone ... rather than re-invest, I was wondering how it would work out if I tried the digital processing route. As for why someone would want to mix media, that is done not only in photography. It can be interesting and fun at times. As for me, I have a fair amount of 35mm glass still, but there is no way I can set up a darkroom in my current life ...

Yeah it can be done, and in most cases quite easily. I have a set of Photosphop plugins call 55MM. It is a virtually a whole set of film day filters plugin actions. The color filters work very well. The Polarizer and ND plugins suck.

 

[Dwig]

...Can you shoot B/W film without filters and then add the filters in Photoshop successfully?

Of course not. The filters operate by selecting a portion of the spectrum, in the case of colored filters, or a portion of the light of a particular polarized orientation, in the case of a polarizer. In either case, once the image is recorded on the B&W film that information is lost.

The only way to shoot film, scan, and apply effects to substitute for the classic B&W filters (#25 red, #8 yellow, ...) is to shoot color film, scan in color, and convert the color image into B&W adjusting the conversion to replicate the effect of a colored filter. I've done this on occasion, though the only new images I do it with are those that I shoot in an old stereo camrea. The only other time I do it is when scanning old family images where the original color image has shifted in color and/or faded so much that a good color image can't be achieved.

 

[icassell]

...Can you shoot B/W film without filters and then add the filters in Photoshop successfully?

Of course not. The filters operate by selecting a portion of the spectrum, in the case of colored filters, or a portion of the light of a particular polarized orientation, in the case of a polarizer. In either case, once the image is recorded on the B&W film that information is lost.

The only way to shoot film, scan, and apply effects to substitute for the classic B&W filters (#25 red, #8 yellow, ...) is to shoot color film, scan in color, and convert the color image into B&W adjusting the conversion to replicate the effect of a colored filter. I've done this on occasion, though the only new images I do it with are those that I shoot in an old stereo camrea. The only other time I do it is when scanning old family images where the original color image has shifted in color and/or faded so much that a good color image can't be achieved.

This doesn't exactly make sense to me. If you shoot in B/W film with no filters, aren't you getting ALL the info on the film that you can remove later by the use of digital filters? It's not as though glass filters ADD information to B/W, but rather subtract it (if I understand things correctly). I still have my polarizers and ND's , but somehow managed to misplace my colored filters (yellow, red, etc.) in one of my many moves since my B/W film days. Admittedly, these filters are now pretty cheap used at my local haunt, but just wondering ...

 

[Dwig]

This doesn't exactly make sense to me. If you shoot in B/W film with no filters, aren't you getting ALL the info on the film ...

You are getting all of the light. The information that is lost is what portion of the light striking any one point was any one particular color. You can't apply a filter to darken things that were blue (e.g. simulate a Wratten #25 red used to darken skys) when you can't tell what objects in the image were blue.

True, a human operator will recognize sky as sky and you can manually darken it, but this is tedious when leaves and branches are in the way. No automatic filter can do it.

Also, even with digital, there is value to using some of the old film filters. A #25 red will darken a bluish sky before the light strikes the sensor. Attempting to simulate this later in PP can be successful, but only if the bright sky isn't so bright that the sensor clips (fails to record the bright data). Filtering the camera reduces the likelyhood of the sky clipping.

 

[table1349]

...Can you shoot B/W film without filters and then add the filters in Photoshop successfully?

Of course not. The filters operate by selecting a portion of the spectrum, in the case of colored filters, or a portion of the light of a particular polarized orientation, in the case of a polarizer. In either case, once the image is recorded on the B&W film that information is lost.

The only way to shoot film, scan, and apply effects to substitute for the classic B&W filters (#25 red, #8 yellow, ...) is to shoot color film, scan in color, and convert the color image into B&W adjusting the conversion to replicate the effect of a colored filter. I've done this on occasion, though the only new images I do it with are those that I shoot in an old stereo camrea. The only other time I do it is when scanning old family images where the original color image has shifted in color and/or faded so much that a good color image can't be achieved.

Actually Dwig is right. Sorry I misread the post and was thinking of color negatives scanned and then converted to B&W. That can be done with channel mixing. With a black and white image there is no color information to be had to apply a filter effect to.