Should I shoot in B&W or shoot in color and then convert to B&W?

Question

Hi,
I am a night photographer from Texas, and I have a project coming up which I want to be in black and white. I'm shooting a movie theater ticket booth in the middle of the dark woods at night. The booth will be illuminated in the inside, and so will a bit of the foreground and trees.

My question pertains to the B&W process, which I'm not familiar with. I have two options...I can either shoot in B&W, or shoot in color and then edit the B&W by the different hues in Photoshop. Is there a downside to this? Because the upside certainly seems to be the flexibility in the different looks of the photo I can have when I mess with the RGB. But I have never set my camera to B&W and shot with it. Will this bring me better quality?
Surely this must be a big area in which people are messing up. Any knowledge on this would be so helpful, as I'm completely lost on this!
Thanks so much.
www.jaredcravens.com

Answer 1

Always, always, always shoot in colour & convert in post. You will have far more flexible options for the B&W conversion. If you do it camera, the camera will be very limited in what it can do. and you will have absolutely NO leeway to put things right.



If you shoot in colour, you can then play around with the myriad ways of getting to B&W in post & pick the ones (or even a combination) of what you like best.

Answer 2

Jared there are around 9 different ways to do black and white conversions in Photoshop.



Each way offers different advantages or disadvantages:



- Different degrees of control over the conversion process

- Different level of having non destructive effects and causing data loss



Here is a very good explanation of several popular conversion methods along with the advantages and disadvantages.



http://photo.tutsplus.com/tutorials/post-processing/7-black-and-white-photoshop-conversion-techniques/



The most powerful and simple method that is non destructive to your file is probably using the Black and white adjustment layer in Photoshop.



You have six colour sliders and have total control over all colors and how each color or tone is effected in terms of hue, saturation and brightness during the conversion.



If you do this in camera, the algorithm used in camera simply automatically develops the photo and you have NO control unless you are an expert in curves but a lot of information in your photo would e discarded at that point.



So, doing this yourself in Photoshop is more flexible, powerful and non destructive to your file.



I think many times people who are not editing images would consider using that function not knowing the image might possibly be more greyscale, not black and white.



There you have it Jared.

Answer 3

you should shoot in color, because when you shoot in b&w then u will lose color channels during b&w processing on photoshop. so that u will lose ur options for experiment during the b&w conversion.

Answer 4

It depends upon your camera; if it allows RAW b&w files, use b&w setting, otherwise you'll get only JPEG files

Answer 5

it's a lot easier to convert from color to B&W than from B&W to color...

Answer 6

Why not do both, and compare the results?