Monochrome showing as colour when image downloaded

[Simon Wantling]

Dear all,

I have a odd question. I've taken some images on my 7D, of some landscapes. They were shot in RAW and under the monochrome setting on the camera. All looked great on the LCD but when I download them onto the Mac, they seem to show up as colour again. Can someone please tell me why this is and whether there is a way for them to keep the camera settings on download. It seems very odd.

Thanks

Simon

[Cameron Galle]

Without doing any research... I believe those colour settings only affect JPEG output & that RAW will always be colour.

[Roger Clark]

Simon,
If raw is truly raw, then all the color data should be there, and you'll need to do the conversion yourself. If your raw converter has an "as shot" setting, then it should show what you saw on the LCD screen.

Roger

[Mike Milicia]

Monochrome is a "Picture Style" setting and those are not recognized by Adobe Camera RAW.
Adobe provides their own interpretation of the the default Picture Styles via the Camera Calibration tab
which may or may not accurately mimic the in-camera processing but they don't provide one for monochrome

But if you open the RAW file in DPP (Canon's RAW converter), the default settings will include the effects of the Picture Styles
(including monochrome) and the results should match what you saw from the embedded jpeg on the LCD.

[Hilary Hann]

I think one of the reasons photographers use the monochrome setting (whilst still shooting RAW which retains the colour) is to help them 'see' in b&w. For example, my husband shoots street photography as one of his hobbies and so he has his jpgs set on b&w to clarify in his mind how the street scene will look when he finally processes it and whether the colours and composition will render well in b&w. Some photographers can do this as a mental exercise but that takes a lot of practise and experience shooting b&w. The final processing is always done from the RAW file.