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importing of B&W/sepia photos

I have recently been importing RAW B&W and sepia photos from my Canon 20D and they always automatically default to color once imported, though appear as B&W and sepia in the import window prior to importing.

Is this normal? Is there a preference that dictates this? Also, is it better to always shoot in color anyways and convert to B&W or sepia later in Aperture or Photoshop?

incidentally, I do not have this problem when downloading JPEGs from point and shoot digitals.

thanks

macbook pro Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Posted on May 6, 2007 12:06 PM

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2 replies

May 6, 2007 12:42 PM in response to mcarrato

This happens because there's no such thing as a RAW B&W file for modern dSLRs - when you set the camera to B&W or sepia the image data in the file isn't changed in any way, but some manufacturer-specific instructions are included in the file saying that it should be turned into B&W or sepia on conversion.

These instructions are only read by the manufacturer's RAW conversion software, third-party apps such as Aperture, Photoshop etc. do not read the instructions and open the file as the colour file that it actually is. The thumbnails that you see when importing images are tiny JPEGs that the camera has written out to help identify the images, these have been converted already. In the same way, if you set the camera to JPEG, the camera does the B&W or sepia conversion before saving the file.

Anyway, after that rather long ramble, it's generally best to shoot in colour all the time - you can always convert colour to B&W, but going from B&W to colour is a bit more tricky... 😉

Ian

importing of B&W/sepia photos

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