Opening a B&W photo .CR2 format that comes colored

[Cleuber Profile]

Hello everybody
I've taken some pictures in B&W with a Canon T5 but when I open the photo on Smart Photo it comes as a colored picture.
How do I see the original B&W picture?
How do I save it as B&W?
Any idea?
Thanks

Cleuber

[Richard Briggs Profile]

This is not a problem specific to SPE but occurs with many (all?) photo processing software and RAW (e.g. CR2) files. RAW records exactly what the camera saw and that means a colour image. I understand there is a proprietary flag (i.e. specific to Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Sony etc) flag in the RAW file which indicates Black and White. And few if any photo editors can read that flag so the photo comes up in colour. The exception is the software often provided by the camera manufacturers for post processing.

So, for SPE I'd either use the jpeg you took or apply Image Treatment or a B&W effect.

By the way, I think I read elsewhere in these forums that there is little value in using a RAW file in SPE (over a Jpeg) because, when opened, the RAW file is effectively converted to a jpeg so you don't have the editing capabilities you may expect with, for example, Camera RAW from Adobe.

Richard

[admin]

That's not quite true with regard to no point to a RAW file. When opened it actually gets upsampled to 16 bits (rather than an 8 bit jpeg), which means there's a lot more detail available for when you do large contrast changes. (If you have "Load 16 bit images as 8bit" checked in the settings, you won't see that while editing, but on saving, you'll get the highest quality result).

Kind regards

Tony

[Richard Briggs Profile]

Thanks Tony, that's handy to know.

Richard