raw developer part two

April 2006 (other articles)

Part Two

This is a three part article. (Update: more recent writing about Raw Developer here). Each part has its own conclusion, because each part deals with an aspect that is independent of the others. To decide whether this product is for you, you will have to read at least parts one and three. Part two is of interest to people wanting to do lots of monochrome conversions. However, if you want a rapid conclusion, then.......buy it. Until now I have been using Capture One Pro. This has been the best raw converter for my needs. Raw Developer is at least as good, although, as you will read it is different rather than better. Ideally you would have access to both, but Raw Developer is cheaper.

Index

Part one is an introduction and disclaimer. It deals with workflow.

Part two deals with monochrome conversions.

Part three deals with the quality of the output (i.e. the actual raw conversion).

Monochrome conversions

There is a theoretical advantage in using a digital camera specifically made for monochrome capture in that you can do without the Bayer colour filter. Images should be sharper. However, almost nobody makes one. Kodak had a go and gave up. Megavision do monochrome versions of their medium format backs, but they aren't distributed in the UK and I've never found anybody who uses one. So, if you are interested in black and white digital images you have to use a camera that is designed for colour.

	Isle of Skye from the mainland. April 2006.

Theoretical considerations aside, there is a real practical problem with using a colour capture for an image that you have imagined in monochrome. When you first see it on the screen you see it in colour. It can be very difficult to stop this overwhelming your intended presentation.

A second, but important, consideration is that with the image still in colour as you take it through the raw converter, you are making adjustments somewhat blindly with regard to the resulting monochrome image. Therefore it is usually better not to try to adjust exposure and tone during the conversion process with the disadvantages that that entails for the quality of the resulting file.

I've read a number of writers proposing workarounds for these problems, but they are very cumbersome and sometimes rely on the ability of a camera to record separate raw and jpg files. Nobody has been happy with the results.

If you do zip your to-be-monochrome photographs through a raw converter then you have the excellent tools from The Imaging Factory to get around the thrid level problem that monochrome conversions in Photoshop are also pretty kludgy.

My best method to date has been to use the profiles created by JFI Color Labs during a conversion in Capture One. These don't get over the initial viewing in colour, but they do at least allow you to take advantage of the tone tools during raw conversion on an already monochrome image.

	A few yards along from the first picture. All work done on all the pictures in this article was in Raw Developer during conversion. No subsequent processing (except for sizing) in Photoshop.

All of which is a very long lead up to a small, but exciting, facility in Raw Developer. In part one I mentioned that it was easy to change the default settings for a given camera. One of the settings that you can specify is that the image should open in monochrome so that you never see it in colour. What is more, this isn't a simple 'desaturate' conversion either. You can specify the conversion method from a choice of six (more on which below).

This means that you can throw away your convoluted batching, sorting and viewing workflow for monochrome images and just dump the folder into Raw Developer and work on high quality conversions right from the word go.

There is one small caveat. In the end I decided that this was a plus, but you may not. The thumbnails remain in colour. To begin with I thought that this was a real shame, as it did break into the monochrome continuity a little. However, I found that by setting the thumbnails to a small size the distraction was minimised. It was a marginal benefit thereafter to be reminded of the sorts of colours present in the image if the channel mixer method of conversion was chosen. It just made it a little more obvious which colour slider was going to have the most impact in advance.

Setting your street photography camera to come up monochrome doesn't stop your landscape camera coming up in colour and vice versa. Backing out of these user settings is a one click reset if you change your mind or have a new project come along which requires the use of colour. Similarly, on any one image, if you want to view it in colour this is also one click from the appropriate pane.

None of this would matter much if the monochrome conversions were dull. However, they are not. Far from it. They are easily the best and least effort conversions that I've made.

The monochrome pane gives a choice of six conversion methods, one of which is channel mixer which itself has over a dozen presets and the ability to create your own mix. The only thing I miss from The Imaging Factory's method is the ability to use sliders on the cyan, magenta, and yellow colours (with constant 'brightness') as well as the basic channel mixer RGB.

In fact, although I have previously been a heavy user of the colour slider method of creating conversions, I have found that the Raw Developer 'CIELab Lightness' method most often creates the right result for me. I've chosen this as the default conversion method so all images open already converted in this way. I then sometimes dip into the other methods.

	The subsequent files show seawater on the lens.....

Iridient Digital describes the CIELab Lightness method as follows: "This option converts the image to the CIELab color space and then simply uses the Lightness channel values. As CIELab is modeled on human vision this conversion should generally represent how a person would see the scene if it lacked any color information."

For the record, the other conversion methods available are: Luma, Desaturate, Intensity, Custom Tone and Channel Mixer. Each of these is described in the help file.

I mentioned in part one that Raw Developer contained an excellent implementation of curves, so I won't go into that again here. You just need to know that short of anything requiring layers, you are likely to be able to achieve the effect that you want whilst still dealing with the raw data.

Conclusion

If you do a lot of monochrome conversions, stop messing around. Get Raw Developer.

Don't forget the links to parts one and three at the beginning of the article.