Canon 20D B&W Mode

Heres a ? for any of you Canon 20D shooters out there - has anyone tried the B&W mode on the camera - both above and below the surface? I would be interested in seeing some test shots. Also - how does this mode compare to shooting color and doing the B&W conversion in PS (I use the channel mixer)?

regards...

- MP

Hello Matthew, I shoot Nikon and Fuji mostly (not better just different) so i'm not familiar with the B&W of the 20D, I have such a mode on the Fuji S2pro, but I would recommend shooting color and post process in PS, desaturate and tweek (3x256 shades)or grayscale it (1x256 shades, not the best IMO), but one thing you don't want to do is close a door you can't open later, shooting B&W in the camera does that with no gain in image quality (IMO) and please do shoot in RAW, since you will be doing surgery might as well give yourself some head start in the file quality department.

Regards

I've shot the 20D in B/W mode with good success. However, I would also agree that it's probably better to shoot in color and then go to B/W in post processing. If you give up the color data in the camera, you can never get it back. The advantage of shooting in B/W mode is you can review the B/W image in the field as it will ultimately appear. Sometimes, scenes that look great in color through the viewfinder don't really translate that well to greyscale. Then again, sometimes you discover a wonderful B/W image after desaturating a color one later. So the B/W mode is a nice feature but not one I will use very often.

A side note here: Using the S2 as an example, if you are shooting RAW, and in B&W mode, when you import our shot into PS, it is in color.

In order to actually see the shot in B&W mode on the computer, you must use the "proprietary" software. Even when using the Fuji software to import the raw shot, if you change the setting in software, your B&W shot suddenly "becomes" color.

IOW, remember that RAW is just that, and none of the "camera functions" are applied to the data.

btw, this can be a real fun process! Combined the TIFF processed in the Fuji software and the PSD from RAW in Photoshop...