Shooting in black-and-white mode

In an article a few weeks ago on embracing the grain in your black-and-white photography, I suggested you "put your camera in black-and-white" for the specific exercise I wrote about. Shortly after I published it, some of you have asked me why I don't shoot in color and then convert to black-and-white afterwards, and a handful also stated the benefits of doing so.

Well, that's exactly what I do most of the time as it gives me far greater control on the greyscale tones of final the image. As described in the Think about Color post, I consider color one of the most important things to understand when doing black-and-white photography. So just to clarify, I only set the camera to capture in black-and-white mode on certain rare occasions, like for a particular excersise as in the post mentioned above. I also do it when I'm playing with my LX3 at high ISO's, where I shoot JPEG in Dynamic black-and-white (which was what I did for the mentioned exercise).

As for converting to black-and-white in post-production, I use a variety of methods depending on factors like the image itself, the desired output, and the amount of time I have or want to spend in post-processing. I personally shoot mostly in RAW and use Aperture with some plug-ins and sometimes Photoshop CS3.

There seems to be interest in this, so I'll work on a series of articles about how to convert colour images to black-and-white using different methods and software. I already posted a couple of videos on how to do this using Apple's Aperture (links below). More to come on this topic soon.

• Aperture Video Tip: Converting to Black & White in Apple Aperture 2
• Aperture video tip: Selective Black & White in Apple Aperture 2