B&W digital camera settings?

[kernix]

I have a Canon digital Rebel XTi and I want to shoot some cityscapes in black & white. I set the Picture Style to Monochrome with settings of 3, 0, R, N (that's sharpness, contrast, filter effect  and toning effect [None]). Was wondering if anyone can shoots with different settings and why. I’ll be shooting in RAW.
 
Thanks!

[Jeremy Payne]

I have a Canon digital Rebel XTi and I want to shoot some cityscapes in black & white. I set the Picture Style to Monochrome with settings of 3, 0, R, N (that's sharpness, contrast, filter effect  and toning effect [None]). Was wondering if anyone can shoots with different settings and why. I’ll be shooting in RAW.
 
Thanks!

If you are shooting RAW, the conversion will be handled in post ... the picture control is nice as it will give you a B&W preview in the LCD ... and those instructions will carry over to the Canon RAW Converter (DPP), but not third party software like Lightroom.

Personally, I do the RAW conversion in Lightroom and use Photoshop and NIK's Silver EFX Plugin to do my B&W conversions as that is what works for me.

[JeffKohn]

If you are shooting RAW, the conversion will be handled in post ... the picture control is nice as it will give you a B&W preview in the LCD ... and those instructions will carry over to the Canon RAW Converter (DPP), but not third party software like Lightroom.

Personally, I do the RAW conversion in Lightroom and use Photoshop and NIK's Silver EFX Plugin to do my B&W conversions as that is what works for me.

Ditto for me. Silver Efex produces really nice results, although it's buggy as hell so I have to remember to save my file before running it.

To the original question. If you're going to use in-camera controls for monochrome, the Red filter is good for darkening skies and adding contrast. A yellow filter will have some of this effect but also bright foliage. A blue filter will lighten the sky and darken foliage. It might be tempting to crank the contrast, but you're going to have to be more careful about blown highlights if you do.

I personally prefer a slightly warm tone to B/W images, but most of the in-camera toning effects are too strong for my tastes (especially the Sepia).

[kernix]

I'm hearing that from other people - thanks!

[Geoff Wittig]

I have a Canon digital Rebel XTi and I want to shoot some cityscapes in black & white. I set the Picture Style to Monochrome with settings of 3, 0, R, N (that's sharpness, contrast, filter effect  and toning effect [None]). Was wondering if anyone can shoots with different settings and why. I’ll be shooting in RAW.
 
Thanks!

What the other folks said.

I find that for digital black & white it's critical to expose adequately to get good shadow detail, which in practice means consistingly "exposing to the right" on your histogram. You can always pull the highlights down in post-processing and get excellent detail (provided you haven't clipped them). But any time you add exposure in raw processing to lift the shadows, you'll accentuate noise there dramatically.

The shadow noise issue can have significant impact on tonal manipulation. One of the joys of digital black & white is the ability to alter tonal relationships for creative purposes. When you use Photoshop's black & white adjustment layer or channel mixer to place tones where you want them, you're effectively applying a 'color filter' over the monochrome image. This means that in some areas of your image, most or all of the data may be coming from just one channel. Many digital cameras have intrinsically more noise in the red and especially the blue channels, compared to the green. If you expose with the blue channel shadows way down toward the left of the histogram, you'll get especially bad noise in shadow areas of your image drawn from that channel if you try lightening them.