From the course: Canon 5D Mark III Essential Training

Working with the monochromatic picture style - 5D Tutorial

From the course: Canon 5D Mark III Essential Training

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Working with the monochromatic picture style

If you scroll down the list of picture styles, you'll find this Monochrome entry. This automatically converts your images to black and white. Now, personally I would not recommend ever using this. If you've watched my Foundations of Photography: Black and White course, then you know that black and white conversion is a really important part of the black and white shooting process. It's where you have a tremendous amount of creative control. It's where you really get to define what colors equate to what grayscale tones. If you just choose this picture style, then you're getting a default, recipe based, kind of cookie cutter conversion that might look okay, but it might not be the best conversion you could have. Still, one advantage to shooting this way is if you're in a hurry, or if you're not in the practice of visualizing in black and white, this is a way of seeing your images in black and white on the LCD screen. Notice I've got these ends here. That's because if I go in and edit the Monochrome picture style, I have some different options here. I still have Sharpness and Contrast, but instead of saturation, which would be irrelevant to black and white shooting, I have Filter effect. So if I come down here, I can say yellow, orange, red, or green. This is just like shooting black and white film with one of these filters over the lens. So if you're used to doing that, this is a way that you can regain that level of functionality, and actually have some control over how different colors are toned in your final image. Finally, I have a Toning effect here, which allows me to apply sepia, blue, purple, or green tones. Sepia is going to give me an old-time look. These others are going to give me more of a stylized look. So all of that's built-in right here. I can dial those in, and have those features automatically applied to a monochrome conversion of every image that I shoot. Again, not the best choice for black and white shooting, but perhaps a good option if you are in a hurry, or just curious about experimenting with black and white, and you're having trouble visualizing it through the camera.

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