My camera is set to black & white most of the time. So the preview image both in its electronic viewfinder as also on its display are black & white, and so is the raw file if you open it with Olympus (or now, rather OM Systems) Workspace which is the proprietary raw converter you’ll get for free together with the cameras.
Problem is, that’s for Windows and MacOS only which I don’t like.
If I open the file with other raw converters on Linux, like RawTherapee or Darktable, I see the raw file in colour of course. And since both have good black & white film emulations, and mostly everything looks just fine in Ilford FP4 or HP5, this time I decided to leave it in colour. So here is Wilma on our veranda from today:
After using RawTherapee for the conversion with pretty much its standard settings meaning that I did nothing else than im- and exporting it, I still took the converted image into Gimp to apply “Auto White balance” which just stretches the contrast quite nicely – much faster than trying this inside the raw converter.
So that’s it – a colour photo treated with free (as in speech *and* as in beer) software only. The only disadvantage is that I’ll *have to* see the image in colour first, even if I want it to be in black & white.
Anyway, as always, thanks for reading and for viewing.