20D and Black & White mode

[Jonathan Wienke]

By definition, RAW is raw image data from the camera sensor without any in-camera processing. This includes applying white balance, tone curves, color profiles, or processing to convert to B&W. The only thing that is affected by B&W mode is camera-generated JPEGs, including the preview thumbnail attached to the RAW file. Your camera is fine, your assumptions regarding RAW images are in need of alteration.

[Jonathan Wienke]

ACR DOES support the 20D, all you have to do is go to Adobe's web site and download the 2.3 update for Camera RAW. And your understanding of RAW is definitely off the mark. On any Bayer-pattern camera, the RAW data is a mosaic of red-only, green-only, and blue-only pixels from which an RGB color image is interpolated. All Canon's RAW converter is doing is applying a simple channel mixer function to the interpolated color image to make a grayscale output. The channel mix function selected depends on the camera tag embedded in the EXIF data indicating which B&W mode was selected in-camera. It doesn't matter what color or B&W mode the camera is in, the RAW data is always the same mosaic of colored pixels which have to be processed to produce either a B&W or color image.

You're far better off just shooting in color mode and converting to B&W in Photoshop, at least if you're serious about the quality of the results. theimagingfactory.com makes an excellent B&W converter that is far more powerful and flexible than the simplistic in-camera B&W conversion the 20D and the Canon RAW converter offers. And before you dismiss my "summary assessment" you may want to consider that I'm a professional digital photographer and have written numerous articles on digital photography and RAW conversion, including Hybrid RAW Conversion published on this site.

You may find the following interesting reading as well:
Color Filter Array
RAW
Digital Photography

[61Dynamic]

Sean, if you have been using a Nikon DSLR you will notice that Canon RAW does seem to function differently in Photoshop conversion compared to Nikon NEF. I've only had the 20D a week and haven't got it figured out either.
Nikon thumbnails come up in color, Canons do not. Anyone know why??

If you shot with the parameters set to one of the BW modes, the initial thumbnail will show the BW JPEG that is embeded inside the RAW file before ACR creates a proper thumbnail based off the actual RAW data.

[sean]

Hi,

     My 20D just came in the mail today and I've been playing around with the black & white features.  I was shooting in RAW mode and when I load the images up in either Adobe Camera Raw or Canon Digital Photo Pro the thumbnails are initially black & white but turn to color when I click on them or import them into Photoshop.

     I have version 1.0.5 of the firmware.  I'm wondereing if anyone else has had this problem and if and how they overcame it?  

Thanks in advance to everyone who reads/replies,
Sean

[sean]

Thanks for replying, but after doing some research about raw files and discovering how to get black & white raw images off the 20D I feel your summary assessment is somewhat off the mark.

In any event, that's not the point of this post.  Adobe Camera Raw does not, at this time, support the 20D.  It does support the 1DmkII which happens to have the same raw format as the 20D, with the exception of the 20D's b&w capabilities.  To get the raw image to load on my computer with the b&w parameters from the camera I had to use the EOS file viewer utility that comes bundled with the 20D.  Like sharpness and saturation, b&w is just another parameter on the 20D and it seems that Canon's file viewer utility is the only software to support all of the 20D's parameters at this time.

Hope this is helpful to anyone else who experienced the same problem I did.

Sean

[matt4626]

Sean, if you have been using a Nikon DSLR you will notice that Canon RAW does seem to function differently in Photoshop conversion compared to Nikon NEF. I've only had the 20D a week and haven't got it figured out either.
Nikon thumbnails come up in color, Canons do not. Anyone know why??