filters for digital black and white

[NateS]

See this is a topic that confuses me a bit and the whole "you don't need color filters for digital black and white...just do it in post" is an argument I have a hard time siding with.

I haven't done it yet, but might just place and order and do some tests, but here's my reasoning.

I shoot a black and white landscape (with camera actually only capturing black and white). I shoot the scene and....of course, my camera exposes the scene which gets the foreground pretty accurate and ends up with the sky pretty blown. If I try to recover in post....I will be able to recover some since I shoot RAW, but there will still be a lot of data lost due to blown highlights in the sky due to exposing the foreground.

Now, I throw on a .....let's say and orange filter. The camera exposes the foreground correctly and the orange filter is going to automatically darken the sky and let me have it exposed more correctly. I have less or no data lost from blown highlights in the sky and have much more detail throughout the image to work with in post...add a little selective contrast in post perhaps...maybe a tad of sharpening and I'm done with the image...and I have much more detail in the normally blown out areas.

So I fail to understand how using a color filter when shooting pure B&W on digital wouldn't be beneficial just as it is on film.

I'm planning to pick up a F100 and will be using color filters anyway, so I may go ahead and pick up a couple filters and test this theory out with my D90.

 

[skieur]

For digital B&W, you don't really need any filters - you can do the same thing in Photoshop or any other photo editing software.

The 3 main filters that you can't replicate in PS are:
Polarizer
Neutral density
Infrared

Those aren't B&W specific though...

Actually you can replicate those filters using plug-ins for Photoshop or PaintShop Pro.

By the way, a plug-in called Silver FX is the best for top quality black and white work.

skieur

 

[Joves]

Well there is also Lightroom and, I believe that the Silver FX also works with that.

 

[Chris Stegner]

Thank you so much. I am very new to this whole digital thing. Yes I used to use the red , green , and yellow when I was shooting film. I almost always had a polarizer on. My thinking is that if I do more in camera then maybe I have les to do with the computer. That is my weak spot right now.
Thanks again. Brent

Don't fear the computer...embrace it.

Look at it this way. When using a physical filter, you have two options. Filter on or filter off. Maybe you want to try a yellow one, then a red one...so have to change the filter, put the old one away etc.

With digital, you just take the photo, allowing yourself to concentrate on the composition and the decisive moment. Then when you take the photo into a post processing program, you can apply all the same filter effects, but you have infinite flexibility as to what color effect, how much of that effect and even which parts of the photo you want to apply it to.

Big Mike, I like the way you think. I understand people's emotional ties to "film" photography, and "I ALWAYS GET IT RIGHT in the camera, so I have no need for post processing" ideas. And I know that horse has been beaten to death here, but I just wanted to say I (and I'm sure others) respect your opinion and insights so it was nice to see you thoughts on computer editing.

 

[Dwig]

...
I shoot a black and white landscape (with camera actually only capturing black and white).

No current digital camera can do this. All current models only shoot color; any option for "B&W" in the camera is merely an option to have the in-camera RAW converter reduce the image to B&W when converting the captured RAW into to a conventional RGB bitmap and then JPEG for saving to the card. This process is not different than saving the RAW image to the card and doing the RAW conversion and B&W conversion on a computer. A few cameras have a mated RAW conversion software package available for PCs (Mac or Win) that respects a B&W flag in a RAW files header and automatically defaults to B&W when performing the RAW conversion. Even so, the RAW file contains full color data.

... I shoot the scene and....of course, my camera exposes the scene which gets the foreground pretty accurate and ends up with the sky pretty blown. If I try to recover in post....I will be able to recover some since I shoot RAW, but there will still be a lot of data lost due to blown highlights in the sky due to exposing the foreground.

Now, I throw on a .....let's say and orange filter. The camera exposes the foreground correctly and the orange filter is going to automatically darken the sky and let me have it exposed more correctly. I have less or no data lost from blown highlights in the sky and have much more detail throughout the image to work with in post...

If, and only if, the camera's dynamic range in inadequate to capture the desired range of the scene and if, and only if, the filter's effect can adequately reduce the overall range to something that the camera can better handle would it be possible for the filter to be an advantage. Under such conditions the choice would need to be made whether the advantage of using the filter to reduce the range outweighs the possible image quality loss (chromatic aberation & flare, primarily) that can result from using the filter. In many cases using the filter would be preferable, but not all. Personally, I would avoid having the camera save as JPEG, opting to save the RAW, to avoid the loss inherent in the 8bit JPEG format before I would begin to consider the need for an optical filter.

 

[skieur]

Well there is also Lightroom and, I believe that the Silver FX also works with that.

My impression is that Lightroom is more of a catalogue program and very light editor that seems expensive for what it does. I played with the beta a little until it crashed on my computer.

skieur