Shooting B&W. Do I want RAW?

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?

by Jim O'Connell at Wed Apr 16 01:29:32 UTC 2008 (ed. Apr 16 2008) Tokyo, Japan | Bookmark this | Digg this |

NO! Shoot 16 bit raw color…convert to Tiff for corrections…then convert to B&W.

by Gregory Sharko | 16 Apr 2008 01:04 | Brooklyn, New York, United States |

I’ll try that. Thanks.

by Jim O'Connell | 16 Apr 2008 02:04 | Tokyo, Japan |

your B&W conversion method is also fairly important. Try using PShop’s Channel Mixer rather than just desaturating the image.

by Con O'Donoghue | 16 Apr 2008 08:04 | Barcelona, Spain |

I have a pretty good handle on desaturating—that wasn’t the problem. The problem is noise, which seems to be far more apparent in the RAW image than in the Jpeg.

(I should probably note that this was while shooting at ISO 800 (2.8 & 1/30) at night in mixed street light conditions.)

I tried converting to Tiff and editing in PhotoShop, but still couldn’t get as smooth an image as I was getting off the card with Jpeg. I didn’t try Noise Ninja, though I could, of course.

Basically, I’m unclear as to what benefits I get using RAW, aside from white balance control. I know how important that is with color and always shoot color in RAW. Though I’m hesitant to throw away any data that might be useful later, I’m wondering if it’s the same as loading a roll of B&W into my M3 and shooting with that. Not a loss, but a commitment to a style, I guess.

by Jim O'Connell | 16 Apr 2008 11:04 | Tokyo, Japan |

Okay, try using the under appreciated free software you got with your 5D called Digital Photo Pro – i find it produces a far superior tiff from RAW file than PShop’s ACR does. The I suspect there’ll be less noise in the high iso dark spots but please let me know how it fairs. The other thing you may want to do is export as a 16bit tiff as the in-camera jpeg will only be an 8bit. Technically you should have twice as much info than from the in camera jpeg that’s already been compressed. If you find you’re still getting unacceptable noise then you’ll have to use the Noise Reduction tools on DPP. An exterior programme such as Noise Ninja works on the file when noise is already present rather than DPP which will be working on noise reduction when the tiff file is being produced. Subtle difference here but what’s a photographer without being anal about the details :p

by Con O'Donoghue | 16 Apr 2008 13:04 | Barcelona, Spain |

Jim – you’re just noticing how well the in-camera processing is at removing noise from the JPGs. Raw pictures don’t get that treatment, so you need to tweak the noise reduction in the raw processing software to get this right.

To answer your question, I am using the latest version of Aperture, and one of the greatest improvements with it over the previous release is that it does fantastic black and white conversions. They are the most film-like black and white conversions I have been able to accomplish with digital files, ever.

by Wade Laube | 16 Apr 2008 16:04 | London, United Kingdom |