Dragon Monochrome tonal response

[John Marchant]

My favourite way of answering the 'why shoot Monochrome?' question, taken to the next level.
(click image to enlarge)


If you want black and white, there's no substitute for the real deal.

 

[Mikael Lubtchansky]

This image speaks a thousand words...

Amazing tonal response gradient... A bit less responsive in deeper blue than R and G but it is so perfect it looks unreal

 

[John Marchant]

If anything the falloff in response is just characterising the light source, as its a spectrum split from tungsten Monochrome is gorgeous - desaturating colour is a very counter-productive process by comparison, and as you can see there are a wide variety of results, even before we start splitting channels.

 

[Gunleik Groven]

This is the definition of kit-envy...

 

[Mikael Lubtchansky]

If anything the falloff in response is just characterising the light source, as its a spectrum split from tungsten Monochrome is gorgeous - desaturating colour is a very counter-productive process by comparison, and as you can see there are a wide variety of results, even before we start splitting channels.

Nice... This sensor with a prism makes a nice spectrophotometer

 

[David Kuhn]

Take it outside on a sunny day!

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Could you post the RAW? Truth be told, you really shouldn't be applying saturation after REDGamma3. Part of the reason you're seeing large shifts through the luminosity is because both REDColor and REDGamma are subjectively distorting the color image to be more appealing to the eye. Even then performing the saturation in linear CCIR601 does a pretty good job of getting closer than any of your other options. If you want a really good result though it's best to go straight to the source (linear RAW) and perform the desaturation there before RED whitebalances etc.

Without the linear RAW here is at least the desaturation performed in the correct colorspace:

 

[John Marchant]

Absolutely agree Gavin - but this is more about what I know people WILL do, than what they SHOULD do

 

[Ketch Rossi]

Nice John... Completely agree with you here!! Just waiting on funds... Dragon Mono will be coming home...

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Absolutely agree Gavin - but this is more about what I know people WILL do, than what they SHOULD do

I guess, but maybe we should just help them do it right.

If you can post a couple RAW A/Bs I'd be happy to take a stab at making a LUT for people to use that properly converts RGB to Monochrome. There's still plenty of reason to use Monochrome: substantial sharpness and more than a stop more sensitivity to name the two.

 

[Dunkan Wolf]

would love to see a comparison with the Leica M Monochrome

 

[Michael Mayda]

Oh, please get the raws to Gavin to build a proper LUT conversion! We would certainly appreciate a proper way to go to mono as cleanly as possible. Thank you for the info and offer, Gavin.

 

[Damien Molineaux]

Oh, please get the raws to Gavin to build a proper LUT conversion! We would certainly appreciate a proper way to go to mono as cleanly as possible. Thank you for the info and offer, Gavin.

+1

Cheers,
Damien