Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/05/22

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Subject: RE: [Leica] filters for B&W
From: "Jean-Claude Berger" <jcberger@jcberger.com>
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 23:17:03 +0200

Hi,

First, you're lucky if you can have a color film in you camera and still shoot
B&W subjects. I'm really unable to do that. I have tried several times (I used
color neg films) and never succeeded. Either I'm in color mode, either in B&W
mode but not both. Strangely enough, if I have two cameras, no problem. Am I
alone to be that impaired?

Second, and it may be related to the first point, desaturated pictures are not
as strong as real B&W pictures. I found that the "Convert to gray scale" command
gives better results but I have to make a really good picture with this method.
Again, it may perfectly be a personal limitation. Just try....

- --
Jean-Claude Berger (jcberger@jcberger.com)
Systems and RDBMS consultant (MCSE)
Lyon, France
http://www.jcberger.com

> > but since I'll be scanning the negatives I'm thinking that I could
> > always de-saturate colour negatives if something looked better in
> > black and white.
>
> This is something I've also considered.  If you're going to scan in
> the images, other than ease of development, what advantages are there
> to using B&W film?  It seems to me like if I shoot with color, I can
> use Photoshop to convert the image to black and white.  In fact, I can
> shoot without any filters on my lens, and then adjust the tonality by
> color channel in Photoshop so that the end effect is as if I had used
> a color filter on the lens, except I don't lose any light.
>
> This is complete speculation, though.  I don't have a scanner (yet).
> So I haven't tried this, but it seems like it would work.  What's
> wrong with my thinking?
>