I know that shooting in RAW mode in colour creates a slightly better image quality as there is more colour space per pixel due to the lack of compression, but does it work like that if you set your DSLR to Monochromatic i.e. do you get better detail if the camera puts all it's efforts into it rather than just switching a colour image to black and white yourself in post process?

The CCD elements in a camera are all monochromatic but they use either a red,green, or blue filter so that each is only sensitive to one of those colors. Ajoining elements are then combined to form a full color pixel. This means that if you could remove these filters and use the raw ccd elements, you wouldn't have to combine elements to get final image pixel values. This would give you a higher resolution, however no camera can do this.

Instead I'm guessing what you really want to know is if the final color space would be larger. I don't think that you could get a larger color space than with full color (though equal is possible). I'm just looking at this from an information-theory point of view. Basically, you throw away 2/3 of the information in both cases (from the color filters).

So that’s a stick to the post processing route then....

And thanks for the technical breakdown on the structure of CCD’s – I never normally look into that kind of stuff but I’m guessing it’s probably as well to know…

Which leads onto another question – the best program for converting to B/W? I’d normally use Photoshop with an appropriate colour conversion profile but I’ve heard that other programs although not as good as Photoshop in general beat it hands down on colour converting – the main one that springs to mind being Binuscan’s retouching software.

Virtual Photographer works rather well for this Phile. But I do know that some dig cameras come with a B&W setting. You may be able to use a red filter for deeper shadows as well as yellow. I'm not shur for I do not have a camera that has this type of setting. But I do know that you can do a quit good job with PS. prphot give a great example on one of the other photography discusions on the subject that work well.

thanks Clayton - I did eventually suss it out and I posted a tutorial on shooting in colour and then converting to Mono in Photoshop including one method for simulating red filters. Most folks seem to suggest if your using digital - shoot in colour and post process to mono.

OK, I'm wondering about this whole "convert to Black and white" issue. When I convert my images to black and white, I use freeware Irfanview, since it takes about a half-second to load and about the same to do the conversion. Is there a difference in the quality of the end product among editors when converting to black and white? If so what's the difference and (maybe even) why?

the differences will be down to the profiles and colour space algorithms the various packages use - the tutorial I posted shows the variation in methods just within Photoshop - irrespective of what other programs can do. You can pretty much guarantee that if you converted the same image in different programs they would all come out subtly different from each other. It's the same with RAW image converters - you'd have thought that by their very nature they would produce very similar results but once again the old ditty of ' you get what you pay for ' rears it's ugly head and i'm currently saving the pennies to buy Phase One's RAW conversion software. every review I have read and people I have spoken to say this just blows everything else out of the water for quality of conversion, the same is said of Binuscans RetouchPro for the colour to mono conversion abilities.

What would anyone do if you just had your camera and took photos? and NOT be able to touch them up...I mean some of the best photographers, such as Ansel Adams..they did NOT touch up photos..they just knew HOW TO SHOOT!!...I sure like that better than worrying about all this "camera lingo" I guess I have to be a professional somehow before I even get to understand waht the words are. Gosh it all seems so overwhelming.

on the other hand many professional photographers such as David Bailey and Lord Lichfield use Digital photography and Photoshop exclusively to fix their photos - mainly from an economic point of view as both were quoted as saying that since they switched to digital shooting and editing they had saved over $180,000 a year in wasted film, developing materials and dark room man hours. Any modern commerical photographer these days who says they never edit their photos either in the darkroom or in photoshop is more than likely to be telling porky pies.

Yes I can see the saving of the money for sure. Dont get me wrong, I love the digital, it is totally spoiling me. Maybe its bit difficult for me to "read the manual" and work with all the settings..but I am learning and hopefully my photography will keep improving. I have a hard time keeping up ith all the great photographers in here who know their camera lingo..and I think the editing is fine..i mean I'm thankful for that too..but I guess maybe I'm hanging on to the "old fashioned" a bit too much. Maybe its my own frustration with all the "modern" stuff. I guess in anything we do, we really do have to edit..whether its photography...poetry...painting..or any other creatived thing...Porky Pies eh ? I like that! I mean I like that term..cute!!

Ansel Adams touched up his work. Ansel Adams created a large print, circled areas and wrote on the print in pencil where and what kind of touchups he needed to make -- dodging burning etc. Then he made another print while with these edits. Because he used the darkroom to touchup versus using a computer makes little to no difference, the output is the same. Ansel Adams even taught classes on darkroom manipulation techniques.

I feel so cheated. I will go home now and shred my Ansel Adams prints. He should have gone back to news photography.

I feel knowledge of the darkroom is essential for truely understanding Photoshop or other Image manip software. Otherwise, how could you truely understand dodging and burning.

Some would say the opposite, i learned photoshop first, then my darkroom work was easy to understand. The ideas are essentially the same because the desired output is the same