Sigma My first DP1M samples

Do you shoot in the monochrome setting or convert to mono after? I do want to try the high ISO mono settings next week.

In my limited experience, I convert the low ISO shots after the fact with Silver Efex Pro - I tried some back to back with SPP and SEP2 and couldn't see a quality difference, but if course there's a lot more control with SEP. But for high ISO B&W, you've pretty much got no option but to use SPP in order to drop out most or all of the red and green data and put most or all of the emphasis on the blue channel, which stays the cleanest, being the top-most of the color layers on the sensor.

And then sometimes I might add toning or borders or vignetting in SEP, but the basic conversion has to happen in SPP.

-Ray
 
I use the monochrom mode setting. It appears to put a monochrom flag in the raw file, so that when u open up spp, it automatically will use the monochrom tab. The great thing is that it is just a flag, u can still go to the color tab...

Monochrom iso up to 800 should be no problem.. 1600 u may want to start playing w/ the color wheel and tone down the noise settings to -1 or -2 depending on what u are doing, kind of depends on your taste. By 3200 u definitely want to play w/ the color wheel.

About the color wheel.... Each pixel location has a complete set of RGB info. The top color layer in the foveon sensor is blue, green in the middle and red at the bottom. The deeper the color the more signal amplification is needed to get the equivalent signal level of the top layer..thus introducing noise. In mono mode, by using the color wheel to only use 100% blue and 0 for the other two colors, u an get rid of a lot of noise at cost of some tonal quality. U an play other games to get back some tonal quality like 80% blue 20% green and 0 % red for example, depends on your taste. Some people like to hide the noise using grain function in spp.

U an also use the color wheel in mono mode to emulate different types of filter effects such as orange or yellow filter as if u used a real one when u took the picture.

Good luck
Gary
 
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