Black and white and dynamic range?

[masp]

Does taking pictures in a black and white mode on any DSLRs increase your dynamic range like it would with black and white film? I'm guessing that it would not, except for possibly giving you more latitude to tweak the white balance to prevent clipping of any one channel. Any ideas on this subject?

[Richard]

I've not tried this but, apparently if you shoot in RAW, and the camera is set to BW, all the colour information is still retained in the RAW file.

If this is correct then it would suggest shooting B&W doesn't have any advantages over shooting colour, apart from having a B&W preview on the LCD.

Maybe someone with more experience can shed some light on this?

[JAS_Photo]

It is my understanding that taking photos in B&W with digital would not change your dynamic range. I believe that your camera just does an in camera conversion on what would otherwise be a color photo. I think your best bet is to use your camera's RAW function and convert it to B&W in post. You have more control over the contrast and tonality that way as well.

Old Tri-X has about 9 stops, but your digital camera has about five. Here is a good explanation of dynamic range:

Expose Right

[masp]

This realization carries with it a number of important lessons, the most important of them being that if you do not use the right-hand fifth of the histogram for recording some of your image you are in fact wasting fully half of the available encoding levels of your camera.

Oh, this is very interesting. Thanks for that link JAS. Marko mentioned that you should use the right hand side of the histogram on the podcast too, but I don't remember the exact details. Also, do black and white histograms let you know if you're clipping one particular RGB channel? I'm wondering how many DSLRs have tri color histograms available. It seems like a pro-ish option. This is something from CHDK that I might miss.

[Marko]

AFAIK.....
- Yup get the histogram to the right border without actually touching it.
- Shooting in B/W mode will not increase the dynamic range.
- Shooting in RAW in B/W is identical to shooting in colour. The only difference is the image you see in preview in camera, is B/W. When you open it up in Bridge and lightroom (I believe) it will be in colour. THUS, the image is really a colour image. THUS, the histogram will show colour information.

Hope that helps - Makro

[masp]

Hmm, does Tri-X have the best dynamic range for film at 9 stops or is there anything with more than 9 stops? I'm thinking I might want to occasionally old film camera for when I'm shooting outdoors on sunny days and can't take multiple exposures (like with street photography).

[Marko]

It's been a while...but 9 stops sounds about right to me, and I think that's the standard for negative films in general.

[ericmark]

Message was posted here in error it was to answer a completely different post and I could not find how to delete. My camera takes picture then you change to monochrome and only in Jpeg no option in RAW.
In fact it has been a cause of debate as for my exam unaltered images had to be used and my camera does not report in meta data when the cameras filters have been used so only way to be sure unaltered is to use RAW files.
However not all cameras will produce RAW files and so how can one require RAW files in exam?
To me whole exercise from exposure to final print needed to be under exam conditions.