Leica M8 / Summilux 35 ASPH / ISO 2500

[Pherdinand]

tmfabian, the camera is definitely useable, but your posted examples are so small, noise and resolution is impossible to judge in such images!

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

the camera sensor records a certain intensity for the red,green and blue channels. When tweaking the white balance, you tweak the relative intensity of the three channels. In order to get blue and green out of a tungsten-illuminated scene, the blue,green channels have to be tremendously amplified compared to the red channel (since there is not much blue light from the beginning!).
Whenever electronic amplification happens, noise increases.
For black and white end result, it does not really matter what the colour temperature of the scene was unless you want to emphasise the brightness of a certain colour - orange of the tungsten illumination is suitable to start with.

This is to explain a bit on Gabriel's excellent advice on doing BW from digital capture.

Thank you on the explanation. There are some things that I just have a feel with direct experience, so reading your explanation is not only good to know, but helps me validate my empirical knowledge.

 

[Pherdinand]

tmfabian, most of the people shots and the red brick wall in the beginning are quite nice.

 

[Dante_Stella]

Light permitting, I use an 80A filter to eliminate that. That cuts the effective ISO a bit, but it does tend to help.

D

BTW, Dante: if the lighting in the original shot is replete with Tungsten lighting, I recommend leaving the White Balance untouched, with saturation as low as possible and contrast to low or "linear", and do your B&W processing from there.

I've found that the noise gets nasty when you try to do the opposite when converting to B&W; also, in Lightroom, you may want to turn the Luminance noise reduction low, but the Color noise reduction high -- this brings out a nice "grain" feel in B&W without "blotchiness".

Just my twopence. 🙂