Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Black & White => Topic started by: Jonathan Cross on December 28, 2023, 03:36:16 pm

Title: Processing Black and White
Post by: Jonathan Cross on December 28, 2023, 03:36:16 pm
I am hoping someone can answer my query as it may well apply to B&W film images as well as those taken with digital camera.

Now cameras with B&W sensors are available and even those with colour sensors can be converted to B&W only, my question concerns how they and/or scanned B&W film images are handled by e.g. Lightroom or Capture One.  Normally a RAW, TIFF or DNG image will be imported into the software and handled as a colour image.  If one wants a B&W image from a colour image a second process will do that conversion.  My question is what happens if the original image is B&W? 

I use LR and have to confess that I have not seen a button to indicate the original image is B&W, so apologies if there is one.  Does this mean that the software treats it as though it is colour, as it would if Bayer or Fuji-X with its colour pattern?  Or does it treat each pixel as though it is just has a bit value from black to white?

My question is therefore how does one import a B&W image as that, not as a colour image would be?

Jonathan

 
Title: Re: Processing Black and White
Post by: mcbroomf on December 28, 2023, 06:42:09 pm
Yes to your last sentence, ie LR knows it's a monochrome file.

You can test this yourself.   

Open a colour file in PS (into ACR) then into PS (leave as colour). 
In PS convert to B&W
  Image -> Mode -> Grayscale
Save as a tiff, jpg then import into LRC and play