B+W DNG come up as Colour in Apple Preview

[Thomas Scheier]

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Hello. I have done a series in B+W with the D8Lux. When I try to open the DNG in B+W, it opens up in colour. JPEG of the same photo opens in B+W. Any hint why this is happening? At least I know that the B+W DNG is there.  I am using an Apple Macbook in Preview mode. Thank you and regards from Portugal. Tom Scheier

 

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[Anbaric]

DNG and other raw files always contain full colour information when shot on colour cameras. I imagine there is metadata that says these images were shot as black and white, but Apple Preview doesn't know how to interpret that. With a jpeg image file, all in-camera settings including B&W conversion are already 'baked in', so all software will see them as monochrome; they contain no colour data.

[Jean-Michel]

Saw this post in the sidebar.

What you see is correct. There are no such things as a B+WDNG (unless it is a DNG from a monochrome camera of course). The DNG is simply the full data recorded by the sensor, it is a RAW file, and so it will convert into a full colour image. The black and white jpeg is a separate file, it is in b&w because you set that option in your camera. The jpg is processed in camera. The DNG is processed in your computer software. you need something like Lightroom, or Photoshop (with AdobeRaw), or CaptureOne, or a any other RAW converters to properly process your DNGs

Your camera may have come with a link for a Lightroom subscription.

[Jean-Michel]

Just to add: the DNG will always remain what it is, you can use it to make any number of variations including black and white. The resulting images can be any of a virtual copy of the DNG, or a TIFF, or a PSD.or a JPG... 

In any case, if you do not print it, it will not exist.

[Thomas Scheier]

Thank you all for the explanation. I will open the DNG files on LIghtroom or similar.

[Jean-Michel]

Thomas,

There are a number of legitimate sites offering tutorials digital processing, some more complete than others.

When I first 'went digital' back in 2006, after decades film photography I found a really good overview of the process, from capture to print from Micheal Reichmann and Jeff Schewe. It is called "From Capture to Print" and I think that it is still available from the Luminous-Landscape site (it costs $13.00 per year to access the material). The information is obviously old, but still totally valid.

You can find at least one video (free) by Kevin Raber and Jeff (on soft-proofing in Lightroom) at the Photopxl.com site

Julieanne Kost has a number of videos on youtube — she is an Adobe employee and the material is solid.

I do highly recommend the series by Micheal Reichmann and Jeff Schewe for a very solid understanding of the processing, once you get that, all the new stuff, and there is quite a bit of it, is much easier to comprehend and apply.

[Stuart Richardson]

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If you use Lightroom there is also a setting that you have to check for it to honor the camera based profile, but I am not sure if this works for Leica. Basically, normally when you import it to Lightroom it will do the same thing as Apple, where it just opens the raw file as having a color profile (Adobe Color in most cases). You can easily choose Adobe Monochrome or another black and white profile, or even set it up to do it as a preset when you import, but by default it will open with Adobe Color. With some cameras you can choose a setting that is something like "camera settings" that will force Adobe to use the closest setting they have to the one in camera. They might not have this for the DLux, however.

https://jkost.com/blog/2024/07/setting-custom-raw-defaults-in-lightroom-classic.html

 

Edited October 21, 2024 by Stuart Richardson