Question about black and white

Does anyone use the camera's B&W? If you have, do you find you can PP the photo better into B&W, or does the camera do a good enough job?

I have shot a couple photos using the camera's B&W, but I feel I still need to PP it.

I did a couple of times, to try it out, but I prefer to make my own B&W.

In general, you're best bet it to post processing in B&W

I always take in colour as it gives me the choice then to end up with both, as to post processing with a black and white, there should be no problems, it wont be much different to colour.

photobod wrote: I always take in colour as it gives me the choice then to end up with both, as to post processing with a black and white, there should be no problems, it wont be much different to colour.

^ What he said: I shoot RAW and can do my B&W conversion in ACR before opening in Photoshop and doing the final tweaks...

Before the current version of CS that I'm using, I used to do the B&W conversion in the channel mixer section of Photoshop.

I sometimes set the camera to BW so that I can see the preview in BW, but like Arkady001, I'm shooting raw, and that allows me to retrieve the color information for processing. Raw processing from a color photo allows me the most options. I don't always need or take advantage of them, but it can be important sometimes.

Whether the in-camera processing will do a good job with BW can vary. I think mainly what we are talking about here is the contrast. Much of the time, but not always, we want to see blacks that are black and whites that are white, yet that still show important detail, and have a pleasing range of grays/midtones in between. Contrast can be adjusted in a lot of different ways from scene lighting to in-camera processing to out-of-camera processing. In-camera processing usually allows some contrast control, but out-of-camera processing software typically offers more options and more precision.

One of the traditional ways to adjust contrast is to use colored filters on the lens at the time of exposure. For instance a yellow, orange, or red filter blocks blue light. In a BW landscape photo this would have the effect of darkening blue skies. It can make clouds look more dramatic. A green filter blocks red light, and would make red lips appear darker in a BW portrait. With digital we can achieve a similar effect in processing if we are working from a color photo. It's not uncommon to find color contrast filter options available with the in-camera processing, but as I said above your choices and control will be quite limited compared to something like Photoshop or GIMP.