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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2006-11-02, 13:35

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
And that's precisely what I mean. Any in-camera B&W setting is basically applying a grayscale filter to color images. The CCD has red, green and blue photodetectors. It *wants* to shoot color. In fact, modern digicams are bad in the sense that there's only one type of photodetector at each pixel location. Color is therefore interpolated from data collected by adjacent photosites. And to digicams, not all colors are created equal. HALF the photodetectors on your camera's CCD are green, leaving the other half split evenly among red and blue.

Here are examples of how different photos can look when you separate the colors from each other...I hope kgarchar doesn't mind that I borrowed one of his photos...No other adjustments made.

red:


green:


blue:


red/blue:


I chose a close-up of a face because of the fine detail you can extract or discard just by doing this. Which version is the correct version? That's arbitrary.

Pertaining to this photo only:
Red-only results in the most pleasing skin tone and good contrast. Not surprisingly, green is closest to grayscale because of the CCD's bias toward that color. Blue-only really brings out dimension and, for lack of a better word, topographical detail.. Red+Blue is a compromise between tone and texture, while the discarded green leaves the background foliage mostly dark and out of the way.
Thank you for explaining this. I really didn't know that. I assumed it was taking shots different than that. I guess it would be better then for me to just shoot in color and convert to B&W myself through Aperture or PS then? Also, I use a Canon which uses CMOS instead of CCD, is there a big difference in the handling of color/B&W there?

Would adjusting the Hue/Saturation to B&W be the same as removing just green, or blue and green? I'm gonna have to play some now....

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