Black and White and RAW All Over

admin | Mar 22, 2010 | Comments View Comments

The first rule of shooting black and white photography with a digital camera is: Always photograph in RAW!

The second rule of shooting black and white photography with a digital camera is: Always photograph in RAW!

The third rule of shooting black and white photography with a digital camera is: Always photograph in RAW!

Most people new to digital photography don’t realize all of the benefits of shooting in RAW format. While, for most situations, a properly taken photograph in JPEG format may seem good enough, the greater tonal range of a RAW image will garner much better results especially when converting those digital images to black and white.

Often times it’s convenience that keeps photographers’ cameras in JPEG mode. There’s less memory usage and you don’t have to mess with RAW converters. Consider, however, that sacrificing quality for the sake of convenience may leave you with images that could have benefited from the extra data that RAW images contain.

Most higher-end digital cameras have the ability to shoot in RAW as well as JPEG and/or TIFF. When you take a photograph in JPEG mode the camera uses numerous automatic in-camera image editing steps such as white balance, sharpening, or tone value correction. These steps compress the original RAW data into the JPEG format and you lose color depth and tonal range.

When it comes to optimal image quality there’s simply no way around it: RAW is best.

Photographs taken in RAW format have considerably better light scope. This means that photos shot in RAW will reproduce the brightest spots and the darkest shadows in backlit images much more true than photographs that were taken using JPEG format. You’ll get more natural colors and better differentiation in the photographs with RAW.

In backlit photographs intended for black and white conversion the lightest areas will often be “washed out” with a JPEG image. This area of information can be pulled back when the image retained all of the data found in a RAW image.

In black and white photography there is one particular argument for always shooting in RAW: You will be able to convert photos that have a dramatic, high contrast sky with the channel mixer of Adobe’s Photoshop to black and white using a very high portion of the red channel mixer or by subtracting blue tones all while avoiding dirty transitions and unpleasant image noise that would become more evident in bigger enlargements.

Black and white photographs benefit greatly from smoother transitions in tonal range.

In truth, you’re best bet to ensure that your black and white images retain as much information as possible and have smoother tones is to shoot in RAW and save in TIFF. While this does take up more memory hard drives are getting cheaper every day. It’s worth the investment.

Photograph boscombe beach1 by copieg of Gary Copland Photography

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