black and white??

[themadness]

is it better to shoot an image in black and white or change it photoshop??

[dcclark]

There are lots of threads on this topic already out there.

Quick summary: if you use photoshop/gimp, then YOU have control (for example, try the channel mixer. It's amazing.) If you do it in-camera, then there's only ONE way to get a B&W image, and it may not be what you wanted.

[inkista]

Unless (as I think I've posted about a dozen times now) you're shooting in RAW, in which case you mostly have the best of both worlds. If you shoot RAW with B&W settings, you retain all the color information for B&W conversion in post-processing, but you also get a B&W preview, so you get a better feel for the composition in B&W at the time you shoot it.

If you shoot B&W JPEG, the color information is discarded, and you won't have the ability to do color filtering in B&W.

I'd recommend reading the Cambridge in Colour tutorial on B&W conversion to get a feel for why you'd want the color information for a B&W image. And remember that when Ansel Adams took his image of Half Dome, he did it with a red filter over the lens to make the sky darker.