I was out shooting last night with my fairly-new 5D. I traditionally have shot B&W film at night and always liked the results, but I got this digital for doing commercial work and for that, I love it.

I have always shot in RAW mode with it, but last night I was using one of my old familiar Nikon primes and had it set to RAW + Jpeg and the B&W mode. (Using the Nikon adapter of course necessitated the use of all-manual exposure and focus as well.)

This gives you two files on the card, a B&W Jpeg and a full-color CR2 RAW file.

I had figured that I’d probably trash the Jpeg, using it only for preview on the camera and carefully desaturate the CR2 to get a better image, but when I did that, the noise was noticeably more apparent on the desaturated CR2 than the Jpeg.

So I’m wondering that if I set out to shoot B&W, should I be bothering with RAW files at all?