ESFotoClix Blog

If like me, you don’t have that Ansel Adams knack for visualizing an image in gray tones, perhaps the following tips will help you figure out how your photographs can work as Black and White (B&W) images. First, if you want to receive immediate feedback as to what your image will look like, shoot monochrome. This may be a paradigm shift for you because the experts have told you to capture in color, then convert to B&W in post-processing. The myth, left over from the days before you had a competent DSLR, is that capturing directly into B&W is an irreversible process. Not so if you capture RAW images.

When you do this, avoid if you can the blah grayscale option. Instead apply color filtering to your B&W capture. Here’s what I do with either of my DSLRs (Nikon D80 and D90). I go into the Picture Mode (D80) or Picture Control (D90) menu and select the monochrome option and enable a color filter. Which color you use is up to you, but I find red, orange and yellow to give me the best results for most situations, and I use green occasionally. When you select one of these color filters, this is somewhat equivalent to attaching a physical color filter of the same color without having to worry about having the right diameter for your particular lens. Nifty, but keep in mind that it’s not perfect. Think of it as an approximation to give you a rough idea of how a B&W capture will work out.

Nikon D80 Monochrome filters

Nikon D90 Monochrome filters

Make sure you set the camera’s capture format to RAW, and later, if you repent from having chosen B&W, or if you want to try a different filtering technique, you can switch back to color. With Nikon RAW files (NEF), ViewNX will let you swap Picture Controls to revert back to color. Whether you do this or capture your original image in color, this brings us to our next option for generating B&W images with pop to them.

Bring your color image into your editor of choice, make any adjustments you want to make to color, white balance, sharpness, or whatever else you want to modify, and then bring up your application’s color filtering tool — again avoid the grayscale conversion. In Paintshop Pro X2 (PSPX2), this interface presents you with a color wheel, as shown below, that lets you set any color filtering you want. You can start to see the additional flexibility in this approach: you can have a plethora of shades of yellow or green or cyan (try finding that filter at your camera store) or anything in between, allowing you to tweak the output exactly as you want it.

To demonstrate how this works, let’s review a couple of images from yesterday’s discussion.

B&W, as shot in-camera	Color, reverted from RAW in ViewNX with White balance correction
B&W conversion with color filtering in PSPX2	Result from B&W conversion (including contrast and sharpening)
B&W, as shot in-camera	Color, reverted from RAW in ViewNX with White balance correction
B&W conversion with color filtering in PSPX2	Result from B&W conversion (including contrast and sharpening)

As you can see, applying color filtering for B&W conversion in post-processing gives the greatest flexibility and enables you to improve monochrome output quality. My recommended approach is to shoot RAW with a Monochrome filter in the field to preview whether a shot works as B&W on the spot, i.e., as an aid to visualization, then go home and tweak away in post-processing to optimize and maximize the quality of the final image.

One word of caution with this approach: it just so happens that the filters I like best, red and orange, tend to reveal more noise in blue skies. Green filters, on the other hand, produce the least noise. We could get technical here about Bayer sensors containing a majority of green pixels which when excluded with red or orange filtering leaves us with a noisy image. But instead I’ll just recommend that you experiment to see how this approach works for you.

In our quest to further understand how the D80 and D90′s Matrix metering match up or differ, we follow up yesterday’s indoor samples with a bright, midday scene with lots of contrast. Will the D90 still show a tendency to expose brighter than it’s older sibling? For the sake of brevity, we will examine the first 3 test cases as follows.

Description	Nikon D80	Nikon D90
1. Here we set the focus dead-center, as shown. With the cameras set to ISO 200 aperture priority at f/11, the D80 exposes by 2/3 stop (1/160 sec vs. 1/250 sec) brighter than the D90.
2. With a simple change of focus from the center point to the one above it, now focusing on a darker spot of the scene both cameras open up exposure by 1/3, and the difference between their exposures remains at 2/3 stops.
3. Finally, leaving the AF point the same, but panning right to focus-lock on a dark spot, then panning left to compose, opens up the exposure for both cameras by an additional 1/3 stop, again leaving the difference between the two cameras at 2/3 stop.

When we look at these samples in light of yesterday’s findings we see that now it is the D80 that tends to “over-expose” daytime scenes, whereas for the indoor scene we ginned up yesterday, the D90 exposed brighter. But can we say that across the board? Hard to say without more scenes to examine. Maybe if we had a daytime scene along the lines of what we saw yesterday for our indoor scene, Matrix metering would switch personalities again. And it is this not knowing that drives some people crazy, and others to use spot-metering in Manual mode.

One final thing to note here is how a strategy of negative exposure compensation would have helped perfectly with the D80: -0.7EV would have been perfect. Not so for the D90. For this particular scene that would have led to 2/3 stop under-exposure, and recovery of those deep shadows (if so desired) would have likely led to visible noise in those areas.

After 3 blog installments of Matrix metering examples, I’m sure we can arrive at many conclusions. The main take away for me is that over-reliance on auto-magic exposure methods will yield inconsistent, unreliable results. Only when we choose to take charge of our exposures and meter as we deem appropriate to obtain the results we intend to achieve will we be satisfied with the images we make with our cameras.

Previous installments:
Part 1
Part 2

In yesterday’s blog entry about the Nikon D80′s Matrix metering, we saw a bias toward the Auto Focus (AF) point, and also how in AF-S mode, Matrix metering performs an averaging when focus is locked and the camera is then moved before pressing the shutter release. Today we want to repeat a similar experiment that allows us to compare D80 and D90 Matrix metering behavior to see how they match and/or differ in this regard. Let’s look at five test cases.

Setup: both cameras used the same 16-85mm VR lens and were set at ISO 400 and f/8 in Aperture Priority mode (except for the 5th case, where we use Manual mode to test TTL-BL). Images were captured RAW and normalized in ViewNX with WB=3500K (except for case 5) and Picture Control=D2XMODE1.

Description	Nikon D80	Nikon D90
1. Here we set the focus on the vase, a dark spot in the scene. As you can see from the D80’s histogram, its metering attempts to balance a very tough exposure that features dynamic range beyond what can be covered in one exposure. The D90, on the other hand, seems to be protecting the shadows exposing 1 stop brighter than the D80. You can click the thumbnail to see the larger image and the exposure information.
2. In this next sample, we shift the AF point to the white moulding, one of the brightest spots in the scene. Both cameras close down the exposure, but the D90 now measures 1.3 stops brighter than the D80.
3. In this next sample, we shift the AF point again, as shown, but before we compose the final scene, we lock focus on a point just the left of the left side of the frame, where things are super bright (i.e., that’s where our light source is), then pan to finish out the composition. This time the exposure closes down significantly for both cameras, but again, the D90 exposes 1 stop brighter.
4. Here we repeat what we did for the third sample, except this time we also lock exposure (AE-L) before we pan to finish out the composition. This time the exposure closes down even further for both cameras, and the D90 still exposes 1 stop brighter.
5. For this final case we set both cameras to Manual mode at f/8 and 1/30 sec, using the SB-600 external flash in TTB-BL mode and bounced. Since the exposure was set manually, Matrix metering only controls flash power, a setup that usually produces fairly consistent results (or at least I have thought so), so I wanted to see how the two cameras compare.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate what flash power was actually used for case 5, so we are left with a visual inspection of the two images and their histograms, where it would appear the D90 still exposes brighter, but only by about 1/3 stop. With flash, however, both exposures seem to capture the scene well and should be considered acceptable.

General observations:
It would appear that the averaging behavior when locking focus and panning in AF-S mode is still alive and well in the D90, as demonstrated by how the exposures for case 3 lie somewhere in between cases 2 and 4. Surprisingly, though I have experienced less tendency to over-expose with the D90′s Matrix metering in daytime scenes, it appears that for the torture test I concocted for this experiment the D80 over-exposes less. Of course, given the terrible lighting in this scene, it’s hard to argue that the results from either camera are acceptable.

One key point to take away here, however, is how much the D80 and the D90 differ in their Matrix meter’s handling of the scene. The claim regarding Nikon’s lack of metering consistency from one camera to the next seems to be a valid one. However, the over-arching point should be that when faced with a scene like this, expecting any metering technique to “get it right” is not a reasonable approach. As demonstrated by the flash samples, we need to reach into the toolkit and pull out another tool to make the image work.

Call for samples: If you have other Nikon DSLRs, like the D40x or D300, I’d be curious to see what sort of results you get when performing similar experiments. If you do so and would like to share your results, contact me via this blog entry’s comment section, and let’s see what we can do to incorporate your images in a future entry.