Shooting B&W for an upcoming project

[J. C. John]

Greetings,
Planning to shoot a B&W documentary on the Scarlet MX. What I did so far was turning saturation down to 0 in order to get a B&W picture. I also tested, red, green and yellow filters that I had back in the film days. I have to admit that I didn’t go crazy with the result (mainly shot overcast city-scapes and testing skin tones) I was hoping for rich contrast in my images especially with the red filter but after the screening I remembered that I was shooting on a digital camera and not on film. If you have any suggestions how to properly set my camera for B&W photography please feel free to comment.
Thank you!

 

[Nick Morrison]

Don't use filters. That's a big mistake.

Remember, your camera is still a COLOR camera, even when saturation is set to 0.

If you start adding RED filters for example, you are going to mess with your RED channel, and create tons of noise.

Just shoot clean, get good exposure, and you'll be able to set your B&W look later in the grade.

My friend Jake Blackstone once had to grade a piece shot desat like you're doing, where they used filters, and it was a disaster.

So don't do it.

That's my advice anyway.

best

 

[Joel Voelker]

Shoot exactly how you are then, in color, use a black and white conversion so you can weight the RGB channels in the final black and white image. Then you can do final contrast on that. You can create some really beautiful b&w on the RED

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Don't use colored filters. Remember that the bayer filtered sensor has photosites dedicated to 50% green, 25% red, and 25% blue information, so filtering everything but red, for example, is just losing resolution for green and blue detail. You're better off capturing an image with good saturation so you can play with the individual red, green, and blue channels in terms of luminance before conversion to b&w -- that way, you can darken a blue sky, for example, of make reds lighter, etc.

 

[Marc Wielage]

In color-correction software like Resolve, there are ways to use all 3 color channels but derive the monochrome B&W image differently, weighing the balance of the output differently depending on what was shot. It's not just about pulling all the saturation out -- it's the shades of gray. You can get radically different kinds of B&W depending on how the RGB Mixer is adjusted. (There are similar controls in other kinds of color-correction software.)

 

[J. C. John]

Dear all, thank you so much for your advice, I'll do exactly as you all told me, no filtration during shooting and work the picture in Resolve. Really appreciated!