Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Black & White => Topic started by: Dave Gurtcheff on April 02, 2023, 04:50:04 pm
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I have had a set of yellow, orange, and red filters for sale very cheap on ebay forever, it seems and no interest. Does anyone know what would happen if I put one of these filters on a digital camera, then selected B&W as a film emulation, process the RAW images then converted to B&W using software such as Silver Efex Pro? If I were not so lazy (I am 86) I could try it myself, but I thought I would check to see if anyone else has tried it and prevented me from wasting my time.
Thanks in advance for those that respond.
Dave in NJ
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I have had a set of yellow, orange, and red filters for sale very cheap on ebay forever, it seems and no interest. Does anyone know what would happen if I put one of these filters on a digital camera, then selected B&W as a film emulation, process the RAW images then converted to B&W. . . .
You can either set your camera to emulate a black-and-white film emulsion and generate monochrome in-camera rendered images (e.g., JPEGs) or you can capture the raw RGB sensor data from the camera with the intention of converting the images to black-and-white during post-processing. The first approach precludes the second, and vice-versa.
A more sensible workflow, it seems to me, would to be to capture the raw data, then convert it to black-and-white in post, choosing from whatever film emulations your post-processing software offers. Lightroom, for example, offers various black-and-white film emulations for my Fuji cameras with emulated filters of different colors, which generally produce the tonal results I would expect.
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Thanks Chris. I use Silver Efex Pro and it does a good job. I used a Nikon Soft #2 filter on camera to photograph the ocean and beach in heavy fog. The view through the camera finder was really surreal. I will convert some to B&W.
Dave
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Agree with @Chris Kern. Also, you can find quite a lot of presets for Lightroom that will emulate various film cameras, including the black and white ones. Personally, I've been using VSCO film presets for years and they always work great!