On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 11:50 AM, Jens <[email protected]> wrote: > When using my Lumix LX3, and I have set it to black and white, I found out, > that the RAW files are still color files! > This is not so great. I want the RAW files black and white too.
That's not physically possible. The raw files contain the raw sensor data. That's one intensity value per pixel. But that value corresponds to either red, green, or blue intensity, due to the Bayer color filter sitting above the pixel. The color filters are physical things that are sitting on (or near) the surface of the sensor; they don't disappear just because you want to shoot in B&W. When you "look at" a raw file on your computer screen, you're not actually looking at the raw data. You're looking at the output of a raw processor (Lightroom or whatever) that has used the differently filtered pixels to reconstruct the color in the scene. (This is the "demosaicing" step of raw processing.) You *could* see the raw data without demosaicing if you used a processor like the command-line dcraw tool that lets you skip demosaicing. But it wouldn't be what you want. Again, because of the Bayer filter array, what you'd have in a blue sky is one out of every four pixels bright (the one that's under a blue filter) while the other three out of four would be dark (the pixels under the red and green filters). That's not a photographically desirable representation of the sky. That's why your raw processor reconstructs the color information, then lets you filter the colors (to approximate shooting with a yellow filter, or whatever you'd like, in order to brighten up some colors and darken others). A true B&W camera would do away with the Bayer filter array. The downside, as others have mentioned, is that you wouldn't be able to do the "filtering" in processing as you can now. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
