Shoot in Color and Convert or Shoot in Sepia?

[theantiquetiger]

I am sure most cameras have it, but my camera has a sepia (monochrome) setting. I love B&W photography. Should I shoot everything in color and convert later with software or shoot everything in sepia (if I want a sepia shot)?

[Richard]

I would always shoot in colour and convert later as this gives you the most options and the most control when converting.

[Marko]

Unless you really muck with your camera settings...AFAIK the shot you see in the camera will be sepia or BW or whatever choice you've made using these settings, but when you bring it into the computer, all the colour will be back again.

There ARE settings that will delete all the colour info, I never use these. Like Richard, I keep the colour info, then convert.

[Wicked Dark]

I'd keep it in color, but a trick you can use is to set the file type to raw in camera, but the image type to monochrome or B&W. Your live view screen will show B&W, but the file will be in color.

[Iguanasan]

Wicked Dark just gave the same advice I was going to give. I haven't done it myself but you can "bake" the JPG as B&W or sepia but as long as you are shooting RAW you'll still have the original colour to work with later.

[Gremlich]

I have my camera set to Monochrome, RAW, red filter on, and the active D-lighting off with the contrast, saturation and brightness settings set to what I want. If you look at my two images recently posted in the monochrome section (sky and cruise ship architecture), you'll see what I see will result from the base image. B&W from colour is an afterthought, IMHO. Importing into LR, the images show up as color and really weird. just a click back to B&W makes them look like I wanted in the first place. Some people4 use B&W to rescue otherwise pedestrian images. Think in monochrome, that's the best thing, whether you shoot monochrome OR colour. B&W HDR is my next foray.