9.03.2015

I've always loved black and white. The Nikon D750 does a good job offering a big range of parameters to make monochrome work well.


Like most digital cameras the Nikon D750 has a color setting for monochrome. And like most higher end cameras the options within the monochrome menu include different "filters." You can set the red filter to make skies dark and dramatic with puffy, white clouds. You can set green to get nicely nuanced skin tones and you can set yellow to get a good overall balance between the colors with the sky going darker than it would with the filter boxes left unchecked. This is just the way panchromatic films worked with actual, colored glass filters.

Just like most other high end cameras the Nikon will also let you fine tune sharpness, contrast and brightness. But where the Nikon shines for my use is that they've included a "clarity" slider that allows you to have some decent control over the mid-tone contrast.

My recent experimentations are showing me that I can fine tune the camera in monochrome to get a look that's very close to what I used to aim for in the darkroom when using various Agfapan B&W emulsions and my favorite print papers.

If you are shooting with a current Nikon model you owe it to yourself to go deep in the settings menu and see just how far you can go in fine tuning your camera to your own black and white vision.

I like it.

6 comments:

Lenya R said...

Kirk, how different is this from shooting RAW and manually using the color sliders in Lightroom in the B&W conversion to edit
the B&W image?

Kirk, Photographer/Writer said...

It's more fun...

Gato said...

"It's more fun..."

I like that. Maybe I spend too much time on Facebook, but often I catch myself looking for a "Like" button on your posts.

Craig Yuill said...

It's settings like the ones you have just written about that are one big reason I will never frequently upgrade digital cameras. I never really get the most out of them within a short period of time. It wasn't all that long ago that I was peeved that one of my cameras was giving me dreadful colors at sunset. I then remembered that its white balance had been "permanently" set to AWB. I set WB to Sunshine - and Tah Dah, I got the colors I was looking for.

I don't shoot B&W very often. But I will have to give the color filters options a try sometime.

Paul said...

Kirk thanks for the idea - I'm going to wander into Melbourne tomorrow wth my EM-1 set to monochrome and play with colour creator (it's like a built in infinitely variable set of colour filters).
The EM-5 ii has the same option.

Mads Pallesen said...

Hi Kirk,
Would you care to share your D750 Monochrome settings?
Thanks,
Mads