Black and White Filter used on The Canon 10D

Lately i have been seeing wonderfull photos in Black and white with

wonderfull color tones and especially contrast is faboulous when i

saw the prints.

 

I was thinking....will the B&W filter such as the red, orange, green,

yellow etc help in producing a great B&W image on my EOS 10D? Since

B&W must be converted in photoshop or other software these filters

will make effect in contrast? I know that you can add or reduce

contrast but i have found that the end result is different.

 

The best way would be buying another photo gear and shoot B&w film?

Does anybody have any experience with digital and converting color to

B&W with that wonderfull contrast and color tones without

manipulating the image alot in ps.

 

Thx in advance and i would be very gratefull if one would suggest and

comment about my B&W photos found in my portfolio.

Thx for any ratings and your wonderfull help.. Thx to this site i

have learned alot and always learning something different...

Thx once again!!!

I wouldn't recommed using B&W filters on your 10D. It's very, very simple to simulate their effect in Photoshop using the Chanel Mixer, and you would still have viable color images should you want them.

Shoot in Color with your 10D and use channel mixer to create various filter effects. Using Red channel alone is equal to using the red filter. The nice thing about this picture is that you can implement very subtle filter effects and you are not restricted to specific filters that you buy. For examples of such images check out Tony Dummett and Scott Eaton's pictures...

I agree that you almost never need colour filters on a digital camera and since they aren't free don't bother. I would however like to point out that there are instances where a better result could be achieved by using a real filter instead of photoshop. The reason for this is that you have only 12bits per channel (assuming you are using raw mode) and sometimes using a filter can allow you to better utilize those bits.

 

Consider for example a dark red subject on a very bright blue background. If you expose for the subject you may clip the background and that can't be fixed in photoshop. If on the other hand you expose for the background you won't have much detail to work with in the subject. By using a filter to decrease the contrast inthe scene you will be able to get both subject and background well exposed. You can then bring back the contrast using photoshop and have detail in both forgraound and background.

 

Again I don't think you should bother with coloured filters if they will cost you money but if you have some already (or know someone who doesn't want them any more) then they can be a nice thing to have.

I agree with shooting B&W in color. Channel mixer works great and you can create pictures you just can't re-create with filters by creating layers and simulating a red filter for part of the shot and a green filter for another portion of the picture. Try doing that with filters and not only will you miss the fleeting moment, but you'll run into real problems with irregular subjects. I do like polarizing filters though... they are a bit tougher (impossible in my opinion) to recreate in photoshop.

I tried shooting with black and white filters on my Canon G2. The results were

disastrous. The bayer algorithm results in very low contrast. I applied the filter factor

manually. There is a thread on this somewhere.

 

You can get most of the effects of filters from the channel mixer.

Photoshop CS has a whole set of photo filters. Go under image/adjust/photo filter. Apply, then desaturate. Very cool. Thank you, Photoshop :)