Picture control set as B/W but downloads in full color

AmyMac

New member
I have set the picture control at B/W and in the camera's viewer, it looked great. However, when I downloaded it, it was not B/W at all; just regular color.

I'm shooting in RAW, manual adjustments, auto focus. Any thoughts? Do I need to download into Nikon's proprietary viewer?

Amy
 

480sparky

Senior Member
Raw files are, by design, color images. What you see on your camera's monitor is a converted JPEG. There is no way to shoot raw in b&w.
 

nickt

Senior Member
Sounds normal if you are NOT using Nikon software. Non-Nikon software does not apply the camera picture settings to the raw file. Nikon will show it as b&w because it applies the camera settings as a starting point, but you could of course turn it to color because the raw has all the color information. Whatever you are using, you should be able to convert to b&w. No need for the Nikon software unless you want it.
 

RobV

Senior Member
I believe I have read here, more than once, that folks don't even bother with the B&W setting on the camera. They just do it in post.
 

480sparky

Senior Member
I believe I have read here, more than once, that folks don't even bother with the B&W setting on the camera. They just do it in post.

I shoot raw 99.999% of the time. But when I'm out hunting black & white images, I'll use the monochrome setting to 'proof' the image in-camera.
 

AmyMac

New member
Normally I would be doing all via Photoshop but I'm taking a short class and the instructor suggested that we do this. I'd much rather do it that way because I have so much more control.

An aside: for the experience, I downloaded a trial of the Nikon program. Nope, doesn't do anything with RAW and as I figured, it is designed for Nikon.

Thanks for the comments, all. I'm pretty excited that I discovered this forum!
 

Marcel

Happily retired
Staff member
Super Mod
Normally I would be doing all via Photoshop but I'm taking a short class and the instructor suggested that we do this. I'd much rather do it that way because I have so much more control.

An aside: for the experience, I downloaded a trial of the Nikon program. Nope, doesn't do anything with RAW and as I figured, it is designed for Nikon.

Thanks for the comments, all. I'm pretty excited that I discovered this forum!
You could also select the images you want in-camera and have the camera convert them to jpegs and then import the jpegs on your computer. This way you'd have the camera's original B&W version.
 

spb_stan

Senior Member
If you set it for both RAW and JPG output, the JPG will have the Picture Control settings baked into the JPG but RAW has no color information, because it has no picture information. It is raw pixel data that is translated into an image in your viewing programs, like ACR, Adobe Camera Raw. You can also use Nikon's free program that allows some adjustments to the raw NEF data. There used to be a program Nikon sold called CaptureNx that allowed a lot of adjustments but that was a little buggy and never developed further after the developers and Nikon parted company, NIK, was purchased by Google. It was the only program which read and edit all the image and picture control settings outside the camera. It rendered NEF raw files better than Adobe ACR/Photoshop/Lightroom
 

Horoscope Fish

Senior Member
Raw files are, by design, color images. What you see on your camera's monitor is a converted JPEG. There is no way to shoot raw in b&w.
This is not correct. Raw files have no color of their own, only signal-strength data that comes from the sensor's Color Filter Array that correlates to color. Yes, this is RGB data but not color. Data from the Color Filter Array does not correspond to a standard color space such as sRGB; assignment of a color space only happens when you open the raw file and the processing software assigns the data a specific color profile such as sRGB or Adobe RGB.

In short, color is a function of the output device interpreting the signal strength data from the sensor's Color Array Filter.

See this white paper from Adobe: Understanding Digital Raw Capture

Adobe said:
... The red-filtered elements [of the Color Filter Array] produce a grayscale value proportional to the amount of red light reaching the sensor, the green-filtered elements produce a grayscale value proportional to the amount of green light reaching the sensor, and the blue-filtered elements produce a grayscale value proportional to the amount of blue light reaching the sensor.

... Raw files also include some additional metadata that raw converters need in order to process the raw capture into an RGB image. In addition to the grayscale values for each pixel, most raw formats include a “decoder ring” in metadata that conveys the arrangement of the color filters on the sensor, so it tells raw converters which color each pixel represents. The raw converter then uses this metadata to convert the grayscale raw capture into a color image by interpolating the “missing” color information for each pixel from its neighbors.
 

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
Normally I would be doing all via Photoshop but I'm taking a short class and the instructor suggested that we do this. I'd much rather do it that way because I have so much more control.

An aside: for the experience, I downloaded a trial of the Nikon program. Nope, doesn't do anything with RAW and as I figured, it is designed for Nikon.

Thanks for the comments, all. I'm pretty excited that I discovered this forum!


Amy... Welcome to the forum...

As you've discovered by now... Your camera is working correctly, with regard to producing a RAW data file. The camera is simply applying the B&W to a JPG image for your camera's screen... Using the Camera Profile while shooting indeed gives you a quick shot of what's going on allowing you to make lighting/exposure adjustments.

Just about all of the available software (not just Nikon's) has some method of converting/interpreting your RAW images as a B&W...and allows adjusting the many variable even in the B&W image.

Good luck in your class...
 

spb_stan

Senior Member
I think you are confusing RAW editing with rendering and applying edits. Raw files are what they are and are not edited. Your adjustments do not change the raw data but instead the adjustments are saved to a separate file called a sidecar. That has all the instructions of what you want to do with the output of the raw data, including rendering an image in B&W. Nx-D can do a lot to create images out of the raw data and appear on the screen or printer as if the data had been modified, by rendering the data but modified with the sidecar instructions. RAW is never B&W, it only has luminance values and filter color codes that when applied to the pixel by pixel luminance value tells your viewing screen or printer how to display each pixel's brightness and color of the data collected by the Red, Green, or Blue micro filter over the pixel which are in turn arranged in a Bayer pattern in the sensor. So it really is not a picture until rendered by a conversion program, there is nothing to see in raw format except a large number of 1 and 0s like and digital data stream.
The Nikon Nx-D software can do what you want done but it can't display a raw image, nothing can, raw was never intended to be viewed directly. So what your teacher was referring to was generate B&W renderings of the raw data stream. That is certainly possible and is how post processing works.

Save your images in B&W TIFF or JPG format to view them as b&w while the original raw file remains unchanged.
 
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