Hello. I am new here. I have a big issue, I got an assignment of about 800 RAW files, the images had been take in black/white. I am not using my own hardware nor software and the person I work with for this projects wants me to develop exactly the style of the images how it was take 2 days ago in b/w. He used a 5DmIII.
On the PC here is RawTherapee installed but I nevr used it before. I started several queues but it always makes the JPG colourful but I need the exact style of the RAW displayed before developing (bw). (well please do not ask me why he did not take the images as JPG, I simply don’t know).
Please excuse my bad English, I am not a native speaker.
I have time until this evening,…so 6 more hours and I am about to cry right now. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE help me, someone - many thanks in advance…Sarah
Did you just need the images to look similar in b/w? Exactly matching the tones of the embedded jpg may not be super easy, but it is not hard to batch process all of your images as b/w.
I’m happy to walk through the process a little later once in near a machine with RawTherapee on it.
Are you able to share a representative raw file + jpg with us? You can upload them to http://filebin.net.
Hi, thx for the quick reply, Unfortunately I am not allowed to publish the photos. Well the problem is that I have the RAW file, RT projects it in b/w to me, but when I start processing the queue it spits out colourful, much to bright JPGs. What I need is the exact result of how the RAW was projected on the camera display and after opening it in RT. I shall not adjust or edit the settings - just deliver what was captured.
So all 761 RAWs are in my RT, all the original b/w look. The I select all of it it and put it to queue and start processing and it spits out to bright and colourful JPGs. I tried to use default, clear and other options by right clicking but it only changed the look of the images in RT, had no influence of what I received after rendering it out.
@Sarahh Are you on a Windows, Mac or Linux machine?
@patdavid Wild idea: how about extracting the (B/W) jpeg from the CR2? Like with ERawP or similar?
Since you are in a hurry, you can - if you are using Windows or some Apple’s operating system - use Canon’s software, called - with no imagination - Digital Photo Professional. This will give you just what you want, it will convert your raw files with in-camera settings to JPG or TIFF.
When the rush is over, you can study, what more Canon’s program can do, an then, what open-source programs like LightZone, darktable and RawTherapee can do.
If I understand you correctly then the camera was using a picture style to shoot b&w photos. That however only affects the JPEGs generated (and thus the embedded previews that you initially see) but NOT the raw data itself. So if you need exactly the same look as the camera generated b&w conversion your only hope is to just extract the previews from the raw files. Something like exiv2 can do that. RawTherapee doesn’t.
Hi, thx for ur answers, so RT cannot do what I would like it to do, am I right? I have Win7 on the PC i work at. I will try to get the Canon software and see what I can do. Many Thx
I like jacal’s suggestion. Canon DPP can even be run in a batch mode:
@Sarahh Ah, you can’t imagine all that RT is able to do – but you will need more practice before being able to perform wizardry.
Actually, RT can do what you want, but there’s some confusion with what you have.
You have a raw file. It is full of color information from your image.
Your camera was set to shoot B&W (possibly raw+jpg). So, inside your raw file is an embedded jpg file that will look like your camera settings (B&W).
Now, RT does have a few different B&W presets built-in that you can try to see if they produce what you want. Open one of the .CR2 files in RT (make sure you’re opening the raw file and not the jpeg).
You can apply one of the bundled BW processing profiles like this:
There are four bundled profiles you can start with as a good base. I’d be surprised if they were radically different from the Canon monochrome style.
If any of them look good to you, you can batch apply the profile to all of your images pretty easily.
From the “File Browser” view, select all of the images you want to apply the profile to (shift-select to select multiple).
Then Right-Click and go to:
Processing profile operations → Apply → Bundled profiles → BW
Pick the profile you like, then you can send all of those images to be exported (and they will now come out B&W as expected).
@Sarahh So… how did it go? What method did you use?
Extract the embedded JPEG image, every raw file has one and it will look exactly as you want. Google to find out how.
http://thomer.com/howtos/embedded_jpg.html
If you want to learn to use RawTherapee:
http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Getting_Started
Embedded JPGs are approximately the same (size) as images, exported/converted with maximum compression, i.e. 1/10 (using Canon’s software), minus metadata. Something like 8/10 could be a little better for printing, although even the maximum compression is still quite good and usable.
On Windows, ExifToolGUI can easily extract embedded JPGs, but fiddling with ExifTool from command line is well documented and worth learning.
The easiest command-line way to extract embedded jpegs is dcraw -e [filename].
However, not every raw file has one; my GR attaches very low-resolution thumbnails to raws. As such, to be able to check focus in camera, I have to shoot raw+jpeg.
Off-topic (as this does not address the original question of how to replicate the look of the B&W camera jpegs): about a year and a half ago I mentioned on the old RT forum that I missed a feature to have photos that I had originally taken in one of the monochrome modes of my cameras shown in B&W when opened in RT. It disturbed me having to see in colour photos that I had conceived as monochrome… Morgan suggested that I wrote a custom profile builder that used the Exif of my photos to select a proper B&W profile, and so I wrote RTProfileSelector. On the page below I describe how one can create a “rule” in RTProfileSelector for achieving exactly that: