filter effect in monochrome?

Do you routinely apply a filter effect (yellow, orange or red) to your monochrome shots?
I was reading one guy who said that he routinely uses yellow, and I was curious what others thought.

Steve Thomas

It might depend upon what you wish to emphasize. With digital, filters may be done in post processing instead of when the photo is made so it is easy to experiment.

Here is a famous story about using red or yellow filters: www.anseladams.com/new-modern-replica-monolith-face-half-dome/

The DPP manual says: Filter effect

Creates monochrome photos emphasizing image areas such as the whites of clouds or greens of trees.

Filter Example of Effect
None Normal monochrome image without a filter effect.
Yellow Blue sky looks more natural, and white clouds look crisper.
Orange Blue sky becomes somewhat darker. Sunsets look more brilliant.
Red Blue sky becomes quite dark. Fall leaves look brighter.
Green Skin tones and lips appear muted. Green tree leaves look brighter.

I do not normally apply any filter effect other than using the luminosity weighting of the colour channels.

With film, some photographers used yellow filters almost all the time for landscape photography because without a filter white clouds did not stand out well against a blue sky. This was because the film was so sensitive to blue that blue skies often came out looking almost white (like the clouds).

I prefer the luminosity weighting of the colour channels because this emulates the human eye's response and gives a very natural look. It is about as close to looking like the original scene as you can get with a black and white image.

Raw files are always color from color cameras, so if you shoot raw, you have the option of choosing any filter you want in the converter, without affecting the color raw image, destructively. If you shoot raw, you can set the cameras "picture style" (Canon lingo) to color or some monochrome filter, but you can experiment with all kinds of filters in the converter or with a software tool to mix color images into monochrome. No need at all to have the final filter effect decided at shooting time, but having a filter effect that is almost the same as what you will wind up using will make the LCD or EVF more relevant at shooting time. Of course, with a DSLR there is no option for monochrome in the optical viewfinder, but you can have filtered review images or live view.

So, you can decide what kind of filter you want beforehand, but if you shoot raw, you can change that after the fact, and as many ways as you want.

If you shoot JPEG-only, and you choose yellow, you won't be able to switch to orange after the fact.

Thank you all for your responses.
John Moyer, thank you for the story about Ansel Adams. My T8i manual reads word for word what the DPP manual says, so it must be some king of stock answer.

I think I will experiment some.

Steve Thomas

To be honest, I don't often shoot or process to B/W.
However, I was playing with the Monochrome module in darktable today, and I'm hoping to learn properly how to process RAWs to B/W.