Anyone still use filters for B&W? Anyone? Bueller?

[graciousness]

I recently got handed some cheap filters and I've been playing around with them for over a week. I've been using them for colour photos, though, and not B&W (if you really must look, you can see some in my flickr).

It got me to thinking of anyone still or has started using filters for their black and whites or monochrome shots? Or do you feel that this is redundant due to all these amazing softwares and techniques you can do to convert digital files?

Ever since I've started playing with filters, I've been lusting over Lee filters. Do you feel that it's worth your money using such filters, not with landscapes but for portrait shots? Never used one of those so I don't know the difference in quality with cheap vs premium.

Moreover, do you use filters when you do black and white portraits?

I have my first wedding next week and the bride wanted one or two B&W photos for home display. I'm wondering if I will get better results if I use my cheap, coloured filters for this purpose or does it not matter because I shoot digital?

And no, I don't have Lee filters. Can't afford cucumbers much more Lee filters at the moment.

Just wanting to hear general thoughts on this.

Cheers and thanks,

Grace

*Professional Noob*


(Got paid a few times lately for my services so now apparently, I'm a pro and have to get used to calling myself one. Accccchh. I hate labels.)

[OsmosisStudios]

I use filters for black and white FILM photos; I use a Deep Red filter.

I dont use many filters besides that: Neutral Density and a circular polarizer. They get used for both colour and black and white

[Elmo]

I have for many years and still do use "colored" filters for monochrome film exposures. The other side is I never use "Colored" filters for digital. I also never shoot in B/W mode when shooting digital. My experience with digital is that one needs to good and true digital color to be able to make a good monochrome image conversion.

[dakwegmo]

Red filters are great for black and white film photography, but they're not particularly useful in digital photography, especially if you shoot RAW.

[brianxlt]

Although the digital sensor doesn't work exactly like film will, using filters are the same for film and digital. Anything you can do on the original image rather than during developing is better. IMO. I have starburst, CPL, ND and a variety of other filters I use - no B&W as of yet but plan on getting some. I try to get the details and effects on the in camera image rather than post just as I did with film. Why fake it when you don’t have to. If you have them use them. Cheap ones may not be that great to use though due to IQ degradation.

[Doug Pardee]

There's not much reason to bother with color filters for digital B&W photography. Unless maybe you have one of those old Kodak SLRs that only does B&W. Otherwise, your sensor is a color sensor and it's going to give color results.

You can take those color results and filter them however you wish during post-processing. One thing that I've found very useful is to use different filters on different parts of the image. That's something you can't do with a lens filter.

About the only advantage I can think of for using a color filter in the field is that your camera's metering system operates on the filtered image rather than the full-color one. This will give longer exposures.

Note: with B&W film, it was common practice to use a minus-blue (typically yellow) filter to compensate for B&W film's oversensitivity to blue. This oversensitivity was a particular problem when taking photographs outside on a blue-sky day, because the blue skylight would illuminate the shadows, thereby reducing contrast. This isn't needed in digital. Digital sensors aren't overly sensitive to blue in the first place, and the demosaicing and white balance process is designed to provide exactly the right relative sensitivity of all colors.

Which doesn't mean that you can't use a minus-blue filter for special effects. Just that it's not needed to obtain "normal-looking" photos like it was with film.

[graciousness]

Good morning!

Thanks for your responses! This helps me heaps.

I did use a deep red filter once last week playing around and then tried to convert to B&W to see what happens. I can see quite a bit of difference....the contrast was something to the effect that I thought was much improved in comparison to me trying to do it in PP.

I do love the filters for tonal effects though (coloured)!

Thanks again for your responses

[gturner]

Filters for controlling the intensity of light make sense in digital, but for colour, you get far more control in RAW when you play with the specific colour sliders.

Can't hurt to play though, sounds like a fun thing to do.

[ravncat]

One of the reasons people don't often use color filters for digital black and white is because of the bayer filter array in front of the sensor. We've basically already got a Red, Green and Blue filter in place - and since the color image is made from those three channels, we have an amazing amount of "filtration" control already built into our files.

Raw conversion does a really good job of giving us access to this, and even in JPG you can resort to using mixes of the channels to control black and white tone. So, Color Filters aren't really needed in Digital.

They're still useful for things that shoot in monochrome (I wish I had a kodak DCS760M for exampe...) They're usable, and will still alter the incoming light, so you could use them, but I doubt that they'd really do more than you can already do - if anything they might "limit" your possible interpretations in processing.

One of the things you can do though, is shoot in raw and set the camera jpg to monochrome, which will give you the benefit of a black and white preview and still give you the color raw file.

[inkista]

I kinda do it virtually using the Canon picture styles.

When I shoot an image I know I'm going to convert to B&W, I'll shoot RAW, but set the picture style to B&W, and often will set a red/orange/green/blue filter depending on what effect I want. I do this, because I want to confirm that what I'm visualizing in my head is what I'm actually going to get on the LCD while I'm still there and can reshoot if it's not. I'm not that great with B&W photographer, and color filters are an added bit of visualizing I don't always get right. So seeing what I'm doing is a great learning tool.

Because I'm shooting RAW, of course, when I go into Lightroom, I'm going to still have the full color information for the conversion process. So, just as RAW lets me "rechoose" whatever white balance setting I want in post, it also allow me to "rechoose" whatever color filter I want to use for my B&W image.

Furthermore, I can choose any shade I want, at any saturation I want.

I can even control how light/dark a specific color that appears in the scene is, simply by sampling it and dragging (where the color sliders are, there's a little circle icon. Click on that, click in the image for the part you want darker/lighter and then drag up/down). This is far more control and versatility than you can achieve with physical filters.