Black and white photography never lose its charm even in the digital photography era. It is difficult to find a camera that does not offer a Black and White mode. Nikon is no exception. If you shoot JPEG, the camera performs the color conversion in the built-in processing engine. This leaves you with little control over the process. Raw shooters are much better off because the Black and White mode in the camera is merely a tag in the Raw file. The Raw file still has all the color information. Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) completely ignores it but Nikon software such as Nikon View/Capture NX recognizes the tag and displays the image accordingly.
So, what’s the point of selecting the Black and White mode in the camera when shooting Raw format? Not much. Perhaps in most cases you are satisfied with the default result so you don’t need to do anything before converting the photos to other formats for sharing or printing. Otherwise, shooting in color mode and convert it to Black and White is likely more flexible.
In this tutorial, I will discuss the different ways of converting normal color photos into black and white in Capture NX2. Read More…
