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Question of the Day: How do you normally pay for purchases in stores?
Looking for a point and click with the following features
- Thread starter Amida
- Start date
Juice
Expert Member
I'm with Bwana. All these things are best done in post production. Any freeware app can grayscale the photo and most of them can separate the colours into RGB or MCYK layers.
Juice
Rouxenator
Dank meme lord
How much are you looking to spend ?
Most cameras (even phones) can shoot in colour, black & white and sepia. Getting the camera to only process one colour and make the rest black and white is a bit more tricky to find out. You will usually get that information from an in depth review of a specific camera model. Most Canon Powershots seems to be able to do that.
EDIT : bwana, on point&shoot and phone cameras you get much better quality if you shoot in black&white. Less noise and therefor less noise reduction makes it onto the photo. Luckily pretty much all cameras can shoot in black&white.
Most cameras (even phones) can shoot in colour, black & white and sepia. Getting the camera to only process one colour and make the rest black and white is a bit more tricky to find out. You will usually get that information from an in depth review of a specific camera model. Most Canon Powershots seems to be able to do that.
EDIT : bwana, on point&shoot and phone cameras you get much better quality if you shoot in black&white. Less noise and therefor less noise reduction makes it onto the photo. Luckily pretty much all cameras can shoot in black&white.
Don't think price is too much of a concern. With the isolation I mean you can set it so red stands out more then the other colors.
Any idea where? I'm looking on my A560 right now but I installed CHDK on it last night and cant find a blinking thing anymore.
There is plenty of free software available that will give them far greater control than they will even get on the camera.
Rouxenator
Dank meme lord
"Colour Accent " or "My Colors" is what the feature is called on Canon Powershots. Seems like even the A480 has it so in this case I would recommend that.
Thanks for the help I will tell her.
Juice
Expert Member
I'm not sure that's is how it works. The camera doesn't have separate sensors for B&W and colour. It's the same sensor. Noise is more often than not introduced into the image by a higher ISO setting, and because most small cameras and phones automatically select the highest ISO for low-light photos, you tend to get a lot of noise in these conditions. I think also if you look at what noise looks like on a colour photo, it will appear as Red/Green/Blue pixels in contrast to the background. I suspect when you render this photo in monochrome, these dots will be much closer in colour to the rest of the photo and you just might not notice them. The best thing to do would be to try and see if there's any appreciable difference between a scene taken in B&W and a scene taken in colour and then converted to B&W...
Personally, I'd never shoot in B&W. You can always convert your colour image to B&W, but you can never do it the other way...
Juice
Apparent noise reduction aside you can get a higher quality B&W image if you process a colour image on the computer. I dont know if you ever shot B&W film but if you did you probably used coloured filters - on the computer you can more easily reproduce the effect of these filters.
Rouxenator
Dank meme lord
Sure the sensor still has a color filter and sub pixels for each color, but the firmware (assuming you are shooting JPEG like normal folks do) will do things differently when processing color as to black&white. You will get a cleaner picture - especially at higher ISOs - when you shoot in black&white. This is something I notice a lot when using phone cameras. I guess there are different ways/levels of noise reduction and sharpening applied to the image.
I know the Canon Ixux range is able to do colour isolation but not 100% sure on the b&w (I don't have mine with me now). It's also thin and light and easy to fit in your pocket without hasseling you
For the Canon IXUS 95 IS:
If you're going to convert colour photos into black and white, I would greatly recommend you shoot the photo in colour, and convert it to black and white on your PC. The camera's black and white setting won't let you change how much of each colour (Red, Green, Blue) it's mixing together to get the black and white image.
Have a look at:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/techniques/color-black-white.htm
If you don't have time to read it all, just look at the difference in the photos depending on whether you simulate a red, blue or green filter.
Technical rambling:
It's my understanding that 99% of P&S cameras user Colour Filter Arrays. Above the sensor, they have a mosaic of coloured filters, Red, Green and Blue, so that each pixel has a single colour filter above it, and records colors in a certain wavelength.
Each pixel then records the luminance, or how bright/how much light came through in that range of colour wavelength.
The cameras processor then interpolates the values so that each pixel gets a value for Red, Green and Blue.
Whether your camera is taking photos in normal colour mode, or in Black and White mode, those colour filters are still physically on the sensor. All the camera is doing, is combining the R, G and B value and getting a weighted average value, which is used as the Luminance value in the black and white version of photo.
The disadvantage here is:
1. You have no control over how the different values are weighed
2. You might want/need the colour version of the photo afterwards
Summary: Creating a black and white photo from a colour photo is more than just removing the colour out of the image. The ratio of red, green and blue you choose when making a black and white imagee, makes a massive difference in the result looks.
Edit: Noise:
Noise in black and white photos doesn't look as bad as in colour photos.
Colour photos have luminance noise (whether the noise is fluctuations in luminance, i.e. darker and lighter pixels) as well as chroma noise (where you have random coloured dots). Meanwhile, black and white photos only have luminance noise as they don't have any colour.
Also, different colour channels have different noise levels. Traditionally, for cameras with Colour Filter Arrays/Bayer filters (aka 99% of P&S on the market), the blue channel has the worst noise, and the green channel has the least.
If you're going to convert colour photos into black and white, I would greatly recommend you shoot the photo in colour, and convert it to black and white on your PC. The camera's black and white setting won't let you change how much of each colour (Red, Green, Blue) it's mixing together to get the black and white image.
Have a look at:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/techniques/color-black-white.htm
If you don't have time to read it all, just look at the difference in the photos depending on whether you simulate a red, blue or green filter.
Technical rambling:
It's my understanding that 99% of P&S cameras user Colour Filter Arrays. Above the sensor, they have a mosaic of coloured filters, Red, Green and Blue, so that each pixel has a single colour filter above it, and records colors in a certain wavelength.
Each pixel then records the luminance, or how bright/how much light came through in that range of colour wavelength.
The cameras processor then interpolates the values so that each pixel gets a value for Red, Green and Blue.
Whether your camera is taking photos in normal colour mode, or in Black and White mode, those colour filters are still physically on the sensor. All the camera is doing, is combining the R, G and B value and getting a weighted average value, which is used as the Luminance value in the black and white version of photo.
The disadvantage here is:
1. You have no control over how the different values are weighed
2. You might want/need the colour version of the photo afterwards
Summary: Creating a black and white photo from a colour photo is more than just removing the colour out of the image. The ratio of red, green and blue you choose when making a black and white imagee, makes a massive difference in the result looks.
Edit: Noise:
Noise in black and white photos doesn't look as bad as in colour photos.
Colour photos have luminance noise (whether the noise is fluctuations in luminance, i.e. darker and lighter pixels) as well as chroma noise (where you have random coloured dots). Meanwhile, black and white photos only have luminance noise as they don't have any colour.
Also, different colour channels have different noise levels. Traditionally, for cameras with Colour Filter Arrays/Bayer filters (aka 99% of P&S on the market), the blue channel has the worst noise, and the green channel has the least.
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How is CHDK??? Is it much better than the original software?
CHDK is awesome on my dSLR - it gave it spot metering and ISO 3200 to name two new features - but it hasn't added anything to my P&S that is of use to me.
Juice
Expert Member
I looked at some of the scriptable HDR and mosaic features that you can implement with CHDK and that looks quite cool. Couldn't see if there was a version for my Canon 400D though...
There's a different CHDK for the 400D that, amongst things, enables spot metering and ISO3200. I posted about it a few months back.
EDIT - http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=197036