B&W

oldwino said:
I will say first off that I love shooting film, and that it is different to digital in many small ways that add up to something. For me, B&W film seems to be about light, whereas B&W digital seems to be about shadows.
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The ability to selectively render shadows with excessive brightness in digital B&W is a choice. It is not an inherent characteristic of the medium. The fact is many of us (myself included) lifted shadow regions in B&W raw file renderings simply because we could. It seemed novel to view shadow detail with almost no loss of technical image quality. It took a while for me to realize that shadows are often best left as shadows. Viewing shadow detail is useful in some cases. In many others situations it is gratuitous.

Digital B&W highlight detail is not problematic when none of the the sensor RGB photosites are not overexposed. All three channels must not be clipped when the shutter is open. Nor can they be clipped by mis-setting post-production brightness levels. Since the signal-to-noise ratio is highest in highlight regions, the potential to render highlight details is high. With B&W from color sensors, appropriate post-production color temperature parameters are also important.
 
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