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How to set Nikon Z6 to show B&W in the viewfinder while saving color RAW images


iKokomo

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I am about to do a "Noir" inspired photoshoot and I was wondering if it was possible to make the viewfinder/LCD screen display in Black and White while still saving the RAW files in Color?

 

It would be easier to compose and "get in the mood" if the image I see through the viewfinder is in B&W. I can edit the RAW image later.

 

If that is not possible, is it possible to have the camera itself display a B&W image after I take it (but still keep the color RAW)?

 

It still is preferable (especially with the amazing EVF) to see it in B&W.

 

Thanks!

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Gee!

What would that guy have done back in the film days? When all viewfinders were in full colour. No matter what film you had loaded.

I suppose you could have put a small circle of that greeny filter material that supposedly gives a monochrome simulation effect to judge just such appearance in the optical VF window.

 

I'm sure someone here can name it for me....:)

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I suppose you could have put a small circle of that greeny filter material that supposedly gives a monochrome simulation effect to judge just such appearance in the optical VF window.

The square of Kodak 'monochrome viewing filter' that I bought 50 years ago was more brown in colour.... and didn't work. It was just like looking through a deep sepia filter. Which is exactly what it was, I suppose.

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That was the reason why I didn't shoot much in B&W.

Having grown up when B&W film was the norm, and colour film an expensive luxury, I quickly learned to 'see' in black & white.

 

Conversely, it took quite some time for me to grow to like colour pictures, and even longer to use colour effectively. I'm still getting the hang of it! :oops:

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Does setting MC monochrome in Picture Control 'just' desaturate the standard JPEG or make a mono JPEG from the brightness values straight off the sensor, ie the RAW data?

 

The flexibility of Photoshop's process of Image/Adjustments/Black and White is awesome. I allows full control over which colours become which tones.

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But still not as powerful or flexible as the monochrome conversion tool in PS.

 

Which monochrome conversion tool are you speaking of? There is a number of different ways to convert an image to monochrome in Photoshop and none of them are called "monochrome conversion tool" as far as I know. You can convert by simply switching to grayscale (Image / Mode / Grayscale), there is Image / Adjustments / Desaturate, Image / Adjustments / Channel mixer, Image / Adjustments / Black & White, and probably I am missing some. However, I never liked using PS to create monochrome images because of the number of options has made it harder to find optimal settings that work across images for me without twiddling with the settings.

 

In the Black & White conversion tool of PS, there are six colours and corresponding sliders. Since the image is in RGB, where do they document exactly what operation each slider does to the RGB values? It appearas that there is some kind of selection of the image going on based on the color values in the image so that each slider in practice only affects a part of the image. How are these regions exactly defined? PS seems to use complex undocumented algorithms for a lot of things rather than something that is easy to understand such as "multiply RGB values by filter coefficients and apply tone curve according to contrast and brightness settings" which is more or less what I would like to have. I understand that some people like to work on parts of the image to make selective adjustments to each part but I prefer global adjustments for black and white conversion, something where predictable results are easy to achieve without a lot of individual tweaking of each image. What does "Auto" do in PS's B&W conversion tool? Where can I find the underlying mathematical formulas?

 

My favorite way of converting to black and white was with Capture NX2 where the black and white conversion had a single color wheel along with contrast and brightness settings and I knew exactly the workflow to create the conversions that I wanted and it was very convenient to use. I've not been able to replicate the results with other tools after Capture NX2 was not updaed to work with the files from other cameras. As a result I do a lot less black and white now. Going to Nik collection to do the same is just too time-consuming. However, I know many people who like to do black and white to use Nik tools for it.

Edited by ilkka_nissila
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When I run the Nik filters from within Photoshop, the conversion to black and white doesn't seem particularly time consuming, even on my nine-year-old PC. I may be missing something.

 

I don't have a working version right now installed (since DXO purchased Nik the old license didn't carry over) but when I was using Nik from LR, it first converted the image to TIFF and then opened up the image with the Nik tool finally after I was done with it, it had to be saved and then I would return to LR. This took easily 20-30 seconds per image on my computer back then (5-7 years ago) and then I would want to do the same conversion operation to 1000 images, overall it was not something that I would consider trivially quick. I am happy if it happens in 1 second per image.

 

I have used Nik also from PS but that also seemed to take in the tens of seconds to complete. Maybe I was doing something wrong? With Capture NX2 the BW conversion was basically instantaneous since it didn't have to write it to a file immediately and then I could make adjustments to the edits in any order. I can't do that so easily with the Nik plugins as part of LR ir PS workflow. Though my computer now is faster I have been unsure if I want to purchase Nik again from DXO since there is no upgrade pricing available for old Nik customers (understandable since google made the Nik collection free but I had already purchased it). Nice devaluation of someone's purchase.

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AFAIK, any colour conversion to monochrome (within photography) is entirely subjective to taste, but also entirely repeatable.

 

It's been a while since I did many of these but I saved the PS conversion slider 'selection' and made a preset.... which can be used any time, including making a 'smart' action key for a one press conversion.

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because of the number of options has made it harder to find optimal settings that work across images for me without twiddling with the settings.

But the number of options is exactly the reason why PS's conversion is so useful.

 

For example; sky colours can vary from a cyan-blue to purplish, and a one-size-fits-all filtration just doesn't work properly. It takes time - yes, most certainly - that's the whole point. Otherwise you might just as well leave the camera on full auto and allow some robotic AI composition wizard to take your pictures for you.

 

Did you never dodge/burn your B&W pictures in the darkroom? And would you expect that to be done with a single mouse-click? Obviously not. These things take time and human intervention. Otherwise it's just a production line.

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But the number of options is exactly the reason why PS's conversion is so useful.

 

For example; sky colours can vary from a cyan-blue to purplish, and a one-size-fits-all filtration just doesn't work properly. It takes time - yes, most certainly - that's the whole point. Otherwise you might just as well leave the camera on full auto and allow some robotic AI composition wizard to take your pictures for you.

 

Did you never dodge/burn your B&W pictures in the darkroom? And would you expect that to be done with a single mouse-click? Obviously not. These things take time and human intervention. Otherwise it's just a production line.

 

What I typically use black and white for is when I'm photographing events indoors in low light, the color from the ambient lighting can be less than ideal quality and I am forced to use very high ISO. Black and white handles these situations well as the noise is less visible and I can avoid the problems with the colour of the artificial lighting. What I want from the conversion settings is that there is high overall contrast but skin should have low contrast to the underlying blood vessels and other roughness that might show up with the wrong weighting of colours. Once those settings are found I want to apply the same conversion settings to the whole set of images from that event. I may tweak the images but I need a starting point which is as close to what I like as possible. I typically got that by setting a color wheel setting of 125 on the Nikon NX2 Black and White conversion tool. I haven't figured out how to do the same in PS. I guess I could photograph a color checker chart and use that to match the settings to previous ones that I used in Capture NX2 and then use those as starting point.

 

Tweaking individual images for how the colour is converted in different regions to different gray values would lead to the same people and clothes being rendered differently in different images, which is something I want to avoid. Of course if there is a need to do local adjustments in brightness or contrast I do that but when I photograph a thousand images in an evening and need to finalise maybe 100 I cannot spend a lot of time on each image (especially since I have to select them from a larger set), so a consistent process is important to me. It can take me about 20 hours and I'd rather do it in less than 5. Visual consistency across all the images can be very time-consuming to achieve as it is.

 

What bothers me about Photoshop is that the tools are complex and not well-documented. How does the software decide what part of the image is, say, yellow? What are the details of the algorithm? How can I ensure that if I make a batch adjustment it will not do something untoward to an individual image and then I might not notice it in time? To me there is a lot of creativity in the timing and composition of photographs and I prefer to work with those elements and use a consistent post-processing approach which minimizes the post work so that it is realistic to finish it in a reasonable time. It can still be easily five times the amount of time spent at the actual event which is too much.

Edited by ilkka_nissila
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I typically got that by setting a color wheel setting of 125 on the Nikon NX2 Black and White conversion tool

Humm, I've never used it but what is 125 exactly? If it's a wheel, is that a rotational angle?

 

If you carefully process one image in PS to your preferred taste you can 'record' that conversion as an action and batch process a folder with 2000 images quickly with the same, exact, conversion changes.

 

The trouble really comes if the main light source changes, such as a rock concert, or if you're really unlucky you've got fluoros that alternate green/purple with the frequency of your AC.

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Humm, I've never used it but what is 125 exactly? If it's a wheel, is that a rotational angle?

 

To be honest I don't remember. I generally used around 125-140 values on the Nik / Capture NX2 wheel after setting white balance on the image first to neutralize whites.

 

I'll photograph the colorchecker and show how this looks through my Nik B&W conversion settings and we can then compare it with the Adobe B&W and what would need to be done for me to get to my settings using Adobe software (which I don't mind using, just that it completely changed the look of my black and white and I haven't had the patience to study how I could get back to where I want to be).

 

Hmm. Would it be possible to generate a black and white conversion profile using the colorchecker? I.e. by photographing the chart, then converting it to black and white using whatever tool gives me the result I want, and then create a color profile that could be used to generate similar conversions by selecting from develop / camera profile.

 

If you carefully process one image in PS to your preferred taste you can 'record' that conversion as an action and batch process a folder with 2000 images quickly with the same, exact, conversion changes.

 

Yes, I can try to do that.

 

The trouble really comes if the main light source changes, such as a rock concert, or if you're really unlucky you've got fluoros that alternate green/purple with the frequency of your AC.

 

Artificial light can be a real pain, sometimes I noticed that in different photos the colour would look different on different parts of the scene even in a restaurant (without any disco or stage lighting), the different lights may have had different colours or they were not in sync somehow and getting good colour out of those images was a nightmare. In black and white these problems are not as pronounced as in colour. However, I did tweak my settings in Capture NX2 but gettting a good starting point is very useful to reduce the overall editing time. Which is way too long for me typically.

 

I tried the trial of current DXO Nik collection and it still takes several seconds to apply black and white conversion in PS. And then the conversion settings are applied but to my knowledge they can't be tweaked without going back steps and into Nik. In Capture NX2 all the settings (curves, white balance, control points, black and white conversion settings) could be changed in any order. As it is in Lightroom, of course, just that I haven't figured out settings that I like for black and white yet.

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