burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

What he said! Good B&W is beautiful. And JPEG workflow is good for instilling exposure discipline. Do a custom white balance and your color-sighted friends won't know or care that you're color blind...

Lenshood Loc: Maine

By all means, I'd recommend shooting RAW, converting to DNG, and using Lightroom. You can do all of your color correction and output to JPEG, TIFF, and PNG. You can also choose which gamut to choose. If things fall apart, you can hit the reset button in Lightroom and you're back to square one. You can also softproof your images before printing so you can see how your image will look using various papers on your printer.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Not at all! It's more like Ektachrome or Fujichrome!

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

Oh, a discussion of this topic always leads to this kind of discussion; rmalarz always uses his flawed pejorative "Polaroid" comment (*), etc, which is why I have been skipping this discussion.

What I definitely say, based on my actual experience, is that I use JPEG exactly as I used Kodachrome - I spend my time composing pictures and then I let professional expertise provide the final images for me, before I finally sort through them and file the ones I choose to keep.

(*) this comment has zero application to me, because I never used Polaroid and I almost always use JPEG.

lamiaceae Loc: San Luis Obispo County, CA

I'd suggest you go either JPEG or Raw Converted to Black & White. Personally I shoot 98% Raw. But I have normal color vision. Color, B&W, Film, Digital, 35mm to 8x10", I've done it all. It has been rumored for ages that Ansel Adams was Color Blind. Not sure as he did shoot some color Polaroids. Otherwise I've never seen an AA color photograph. So don't feel bad, you are in good company. That is a possibility too, you could try b&w film. Good luck.

jwohlhueter

Steve,
Set your camera to take both RAW and JPG and get your hands on a copy of Photoshop as fast as you can! Photoshop and Camera Raw will take your editing to another level. I am color blind myself and have been using these tools for years. They will enhance and improve the photos of the color-blind just as they do for everyone else. Dan Margulis, a member of the Photoshop Hall of Fame, in his book “Photoshop LAB Color” says about the color blind, “They appear to respond to blues at least as well as the rest of us do. Is it possible that they actually see it better? Can the color blind be picking up a distinction that’s too subtle for the rest of us? We can see colors that aren’t even on their map, but is it not possible that the converse may also be true - that the green they see is simply a color that’s out of our gamut?” Dan has taught color-blind students in his color correction classes and they perform as well as the other students. Not exactly the same of course, but have you seen some of the images perfect color perception photographers pass off as being great work? I mean really.....

Calling the color-blind photographer “handicapped”, that we should move to black and white is at the least naive and borderline offensive.

If you enjoy post production as much as it sounds you are in for a treat.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

On further consideration, if I were colorblind, I would save my pennies and get a Leica M Monochrom! Expensive, but every pixel on the sensor is dedicated to black and white. The RAW files are great! It is expensive, but what a great camera!

jwohlhueter

Speaking as a color-blind person who has been a photographer for years I can emphatically say that, NO you would not switch to just black and white. The issue of insensitivity to the full ranges of greens and browns is very minor compared to the full range we see in all other colors. The mind and the eyes ability to compensate are remarkable. So NO, to give up woking with all colors and excepting black and white as your only outlet would be like asking someone with minor hearing loss to remove their ears. To describe the green/brown insensitivity issue as "color-blind" is part of the problem. They couldn't have picked a worse label.

I'll say this again, like I did in my previous post... Calling the color-blind photographer “handicapped”, that we should move to black and white is at the least naive and borderline offensive.