Using lens with yellow filter on color digital cameras

[shirubadanieru]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

Hi everyone I have a question & was wondering if anyone can share tips. 

I am using a Summar and just acquired the original yellow filter for it. 

I was shooting it today with the M9P with the camera set to B&W JPG.

Are there any settings I should have in mind when doing this? For example, white balance? Will the camera try to offset the yellow and set the pictures cooler? Or is that irrelevant? And anything else I should have in mind. 

Thanks in advance for any tips you may have! 

[adan]

Well, in the case of B&W jpegs, there will be no "white balance" to worry about.

If you are planning to leave it in place for color work (.jpg or .DNG) - yeah, it may distort colors somewhat, but not a lot more than simply shooting indoors under yellowish living-room light bulbs.

It will, of course, block some of the available light (the blue part) - which will mean you will need to use a higher ISO, and get more noise, for a given situation. Probably about 1 stop's worth (the "filter factor"). And your blue channel may be virtually black (yellow light can't get through the blue filters).

But it's sometimes amazing what can be color-corrected. 45 years ago I worked in a camera store and lab briefly, and one customer came in who had shot her color negative film with a yellow filter (because she'd been told it would enhance blue skies ).

Amazingly, even our 1976-technology mini-lab correction filters were able to dial out most of the excess yellow - and damned if it didn't enhance the skies as well.

[shirubadanieru]

17 minutes ago, adan said:

Well, in the case of B&W jpegs, there will be no "white balance" to worry about.

If you are planning to leave it in place for color work (.jpg or .DNG) - yeah, it may distort colors somewhat, but not a lot more than simply shooting indoors under yellowish living-room light bulbs.

It will, of course, block some of the available light (the blue part) - which will mean you will need to use a higher ISO, and get more noise, for a given situation. Probably about 1 stop's worth (the "filter factor"). And your blue channel may be virtually black (yellow light can't get through the blue filters).

But it's sometimes amazing what can be color-corrected. 45 years ago I worked in a camera store and lab briefly, and one customer came in who had shot her color negative film with a yellow filter (because she'd been told it would enhance blue skies ).

Amazingly, even our 1976-technology mini-lab correction filters were able to dial out most of the excess yellow - and damned if it didn't enhance the skies as well.

thank you! i was testing shooting dng & jpg b&w to see which would provide best results, the dng converted to b&w or the b&w jpg. when i looked at the dngs though they were not very yellow so it seemed the camera was trying to correct the color cast with the white balance adjustments. 

I'm using a yellow filter by the way. 

[adan]

44 minutes ago, shirubadanieru said:

I'm using a yellow filter by the way. 

I know - I was talking about the blue filters built into your color sensor.

[Erato]

There're three different ways to apply colors for B/W photography accordingly with your physical setup.

1. Post-process -- Capture One, Adobe Lightroom or so. The downside is the more parameters you pushed, the grainy outcome appears. 

2. Pre-process -- physical filters comes with different filter purposes/factors against different wavelength correspondingly. Since this method only changes certain wavelength of photons hitting the sensor, so it won't eliminating certain pixels from recording any luminance at all. In other words, you only reduce the light from a specific wavelength throughout the light path.

3. In-Camera process -- you may apply filters by proper setting throughout the menu of M240-P or so. I'm not a M9P user, you'd need to compare the result accordingly if your camera support "in-camera color filters".

FYR, if you're a M9M user, you may noticed that the difference is minor in some use cases, especially when you choose to apply low filter factors such as light yellow or so.
The pros of physical filters are so obvious, and you may select different filter to fit your aesthetics.

 

 

[Jean-Michel]

The digital sensor is not film.

Most B&W films are panchromatic, meaning that the emulsions is sensitive to the 'entire' light spectrum more orles equally according to the intensity of the light. This is why green and red apples would render as the more or less same grey apple. Using yellow, green, or red filters absorbs some of the opposite spectrum and you end up with, for example, a darkened blue sky when you use a yellow or red filter. Some b&w emulsions are 'ortho'(blue-green sensitive, non-sensitive to red), or IR, …

The beauty of using a colour digital sensor is that you get to apply whatever colour filter you want when converting a dng or raw file to b&w. 

The b&w jpg produced by a Leica is mostly fine, but is of course not adjustable for changing the various colours of the scene; if the blue sky is the same value as the white cloud, then you are stuck with that.

I have not photographed with a monochrome sensor, but since such sensor is panchromatic,  using colour filters would alter the rendition of colours, but unlikely to be identical to various panchromatic films emulsions.

Using colour filters on a digital colour sensor does not make much sense other than for simply satisfying one's curiosity.

[Jeff S]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

My approach is simple: always DNG, whether color or b/w (conversions or via Monochrom); and, color lens filters only (occasionally) for Monochrom (or b/w film).  Color digital provides color control and flexibility through use of custom camera profiles and myriad potential adjustments in PP, including possible use of color channels.  I would never use color lens filters with a color digital camera; just one more unnecessary and uncontrollable variable.

Jeff

Edited October 29, 2021 by Jeff S