red filter for digital camera

<p>I used a red filter which darkened the sky and lightened the clouds to produce dramatic contrast when I used a film camera for my black and white photographs. I'm relatively new to digital cameras so my question is how do I obtain similar results w/ a digital camera? When I downloaded my image and converted them to back and white with photoshop 6.0 and tried to digitally apply a 'red' filter, it only puts a red tint on the photo and not the dramatic contrasts with the sky like my black and white film. Any suggestions? P.S. I'm not very familiar w/ P.S 6.0. Thanks </p>

<p>Assuming you are talking about Photoshop 6 and not Photoshop Elements 6, you need to use the Channel Mixer to accentuate the red channel and reduce the green and blue channels.<br>

I don't know whether Elements 6 has a channel mixer facility.</p>

<p>Not having stated which level of digital camera you are using (p&s/DSLR, Bridge) you may have the ability to take the photo in B&W within the camera. If this is the case, then a couple of things I'd throw out there.</p>

<p>1) There is no reason you still can't use the filters you did for Film on Digital. I have a DSLR and still use filters (ND, ND-grad, Polorizer, color adjusting, etc). No matter what version of photoshop, or the skills you have with the program, the better the picture going in, the better it will be in the end.<br>

2) Some digital cameras in the Bridge and DSLR range will apply the filters for B&W directly to the image when you take it within the firmware of the camera.</p>

<p>A color filter on a digital sensor isn't going to do the same thing as it does with B&W film.<br />With some cameras you can produce B&W images in camera, but you're probably going to have better results taking a color image and converting it to B&W later by one of several methods. The channel mixer, as mentioned above, is one of them with which you can produce results just like, or better than, a red filter on B&W film.<br />I don't think using color adjusting filters on digital is needed. The camera will try to adjust white balance with the filter on, negating its effects. ND, Grad ND, and polarizing filters are the main filters for digital.</p>

<p>An actual color filter will have the same effect as on film. Your raw file will be red tinted. This is done by removing some light from wavelengths that are not red. So things that are not red, including the sky, will be darkened, while things that are red will come through in full and things in between will be darkened proportionally.</p>

<p>Then you convert the raw to BW using your preferred method (hopefully this will be something more interesting than changing the color mode to grayscale) and you'll see the contrast enhancing, sky darkening effect of a red filter on BW.</p>

<p>What you did wrong the first time around was you got the order wrong. Converting to BW, then applying a red filter, will just give you a red tinted monochrome image. If you reversed that, doing a red filter in software then doing BW, you would get some of the effect but not all of it - because there will be information in the non-red highlights that would have been there using a red glass filter on the lens, that will have been lost (or maybe I should say recorder differently - but the effect is not going to be quite the same).</p>

<p>> An actual color filter will have the same effect as on film.</p>

<p>Well Andrew actually it won't have the same effect for several reasons.</p>

<p>So no don't use contrast filters for B&W effects on digital cameras.</p>

<p> </p>

<blockquote>

<p>1) There is no reason you still can't use the filters you did for Film on Digital.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Of course there is. A digital camera has 50% of its pixels filtered green, 25% red, 25% blue. It uses all those colors for deriving detail. If you put a classic B&W R25 in front of that, you cut off all the green and blue information, the resolution drops dramatically, and you get a lot more weird artifacts, like moire and jaggies.</p>

<p>I don't have Photoshop. I use Picasa... It's free and you have a choice of different filters to make a good black and white. Works for me.</p>

<p>You can use NIK Silver Pro plugin in PS CS to make BW images from color digital files. It has many features, including filters, one is a red filter. </p>