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Matt Blaze @federate.social

#photography nerditry:

#photography nerditry:

Is it worth using a monochrome sensor for making digital B&W photos?

TL;DR: Sometimes, but the benefits are relatively limited and may not outweigh the cost and hassle.

I make mostly B&W photos, at least in my fine art photography practice. I'm fortunate to have both the color and achromatic (B&W) versions of the sensor I use in my main camera system, but I usually (about 80% of the time) use the color sensor and convert to B&W in post processing.

The tradeoffs:

1/

21 comments

  • The main advantage to using a color sensor for B&W photos is that you can do color contrast filtration (adjusting the relative brightness of different colors) as part of the post-processing workflow instead of at the time the image is captured. This is a big deal. It means you're not locked in to the filtration decisions you made when you captured the photo and have access to a far more nuanced range of filtration options than you would with optical filters.

    2/

    • It also means you don't have to buy and carry around dozens of optical filters in different colors. In my color kit I just have a polarizer (which you can't do in postprocessing) and some ND filters (for long exposures). This represents a big savings in expense, weight, and general cumbersomeness.

      So why use an achromatic sensor at all?

      3/

      • Unfortunately, the way color sensors work can, under some conditions, slightly degrade image sharpness for some subjects. This is because (most) color sensors don't actually capture color information at each photosite. The underlying sensor is an array of monochromatic pixels. But it's covered with a filter, usually a "Bayer filter", that masks adjacent pixels with red, green or blue. An algorithm derives (guesses) the correct color of each pixel in the final image based on adjacent pixels.

        4/

      • @mattblaze@federate.social My favorite picture that anyone ever took of me was with a Leica Monochrom but that guy is a terrific portraitist and probably could have got the same result with a conventional color sensor. So I probably agree with you.

        Also, Silver Efex.

21 comments