What About Red and Black & White Photography?

[Manfred Lopez]

I don't know if this has been discussed, but can Red produce beautiful Black & White photography? And I am not just talking about desaturating color footage in post to get that palette-of-grays look. Is there anyway to tweek the sensor to be B&W only? r does this go against the whole spirit of digital photography?

[Ace]

The good thing about RAW is that you can just remove the Red, green or blue channels accordingly, the same way you would with a filter on BW photography, giving you brilliant whites and blacks, and not just greys as you would achieve via desaturation.

[David Mullen ASC]

Generally it's better to remove the color later in post, because you can control the contrast of the b&w image better when you can play with separate color records -- for example, you can make a blue sky darker from the surrounding scene before you remove the color. It's a little like using color-contrast filters on panchromatic b&w filmstock. If you turn the image to b&w first before you color-correct it, then all you can do is adjust overall contrast and brightness.

Also, the camera has a Bayer-filtered image being recorded RAW, so even processing it to b&w would probably take place after recording.

It would be easy for shooting purposes to just turn the monitors to b&w to judge the image.

[Poi Boy]

I think we are going to see stunning BW from this camera. That is one of the first things I plan on doing with it. Working with Raw files is going to be gloryous.
Aloha
-A

[Manfred Lopez]

This is exciting then, because as Orson Welles once said "Great acting can only happen in B&W!" ...Well, he might have been full of himself on this one.

But anyway, I think that B&W is one of the best ways to learn lighting. Roman Polansky said that in order to earn his film degree he had to pass this photography class where as a final test they had light and photograph white statues... which aparently is the most difficult thing to do properly.

[Ace]

Yes in post ofcourse, that is what I meant. Playing with RAW controls on photoshop with existing DSLR imagery creates some interesting black and white imagery. Whats great about it, is that you can create the perfect mixture of contrast from all 3 channels. Bit of highlight from here, and a bit of shadow from there, etc.

[Anders Holck]

Here is a little sample, using only channel mixing:
http://www.holckowen.com/red/bw.gif
(It's an animation gif, so it can take a few secs to load before it animates)

Funny how the gif dither almost looks like film grain :-)

[Manfred Lopez]

Here is a little sample, using only channel mixing:


For a sec I thought my mac crashed... :wink: Then I realized that the thing is anymated. I kind of whish you would have done stills instead because I can't concentrate on any one image long enough.

[Anders Holck]

Just save it to your desktop, and open it in the Quicktime player
Or on the mac, right click it to stop it momentarily.

[Manfred Lopez]

Um, okay. The images look like the 'palette-of-grays' that I was talking about. I think that there is more to it then just channel mixing. There is a reason why black and white photographic prints (stills) printed on real photographic paper have to be scanned in color to retain their richness. Many times I'm convinced that the blacks have some purple in them.

In the negative film world, there is no way to reproduce with a color negative the look and saturation of Plus-X.

[GlennChan]

You can add tinting like sepia toning to make a "black and white" image look more interesting. Sin City did this (check out their trailer on apple's quicktime site).

Also see
http://photo.net/photo/sepia/index

[Gavin Greenwalt]

In the negative film world, there is no way to reproduce with a color negative the look and saturation of Plus-X.

Except of course with something like http://www.silveroxide.com/