seeing in B&W

[jann1033]

not sure if this would work on all cameras but i might try it next time

"So what happens if you can’t see in B&W?

Well, for some photographers, you don’t need to, you can let your camera do it for you. I discovered this while playing with my Canon 20D a few weeks back and love it. I shoot in RAW all the time, so any changes I make to the camera’s parameters: sharpness, contrast, saturation etc don’t affect the RAW file. Neither does the B&W setting!

It DOES affect the preview you get on the LCD screen, so you will see your photo in B&W immediately after taking the shot, but the RAW file will still have all of the colour information. So you can instantly tell if the shot will work in B&W but also still have the option of keeping it in colour."
from
http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/do-you-see-in-black-and-white/

 

[MarkBarbieri]

That's a pretty neat suggestion. It's certainly good for a quick impression.

The only problem is that it does a straight conversion to black and white. Ideally, you'll want to try messing with the different color channels. For example, the sky might look boring with a standard conversion to BW, but if you really lowered the blue channel, the clouds might really pop out as white against a darker background.

To really master B&W photography, I suspect that you need to be able to see all types of contrasts, not just light<-->dark but color contrasts as well. The latter are important for B&W because you can manipulate the image so that color contrasts become light<-->dark contrasts.

I usually bring a dog and ask him for an opinion.

 

[mabas9395]

I really like B&W photos, but I have a hard time visualizing what it will look like before I shoot or do the conversion. This will help a lot and still let me keep it in color or do a proper channel based conversion.