If you want one dependable answer to what camera settings for black and white photography come back to, here it is: shoot RAW plus JPEG, set the picture style or picture control to Monochrome with contrast raised one or two steps, leave white balance on Auto or Daylight, keep ISO at the camera’s base setting, and shoot in Aperture Priority. That combination takes about ninety seconds to set and gives you a frame you can actually develop.
Most people who get stuck on this question are not stuck on photography. They are stuck in a menu, because every brand names the same setting something different: Canon calls it a Picture Style, Nikon a Picture Control, Sony a Creative Look, Fujifilm a Film Simulation. Once you find it, the rest is straightforward.
One thing worth saying early, because it changes how you think about the whole workflow. Turning on monochrome on a digital camera does not change the sensor. The sensor still records full colour in the RAW file, and the camera is simply desaturating the JPEG and the screen so you can compose for tone instead of colour. On a dedicated monochrome body like a Leica M Monochrom, the sensor itself has no colour filters, and the result is different.
The rest of this guide walks through the settings in the order you actually touch them, with the numbers I would start from.
Table of Contents
- What You Need Before You Touch the Menu
- Step-by-Step: The Camera Settings for Black and White Photography That Work
- Common Mistakes and How to Correct Them
- Frequently Asked Questions
- What camera settings should I use for black and white photography?
- Does it matter what white balance I use in black and white photography?
- Is f/2.8 or f/4 better for isolating a subject in black and white?
- Should I shoot black and white in camera or convert RAW in editing software?
- Do the in-camera red, yellow and green filter effects actually work?
- How do I stop my black and white photos clipping to pure black?
- Conclusion: Start From One Reliable Baseline
What You Need Before You Touch the Menu
Not much, honestly. A camera that writes RAW is the one piece of gear that changes the ceiling on what you can do later, and every current DSLR or mirrorless body does that. Beyond that it is a lens, some way to steady the camera, and software that can convert a colour RAW into a greyscale image you still want to look at.
A tripod matters more in black and white than it does in colour, for one specific reason. With colour removed, fine detail and texture carry the picture, and texture needs sharpness. A tripod lets you drop to 1/30s or 1/8s and hold that sharpness, which also gives you the option of lowering ISO further. If you have no tripod, image stabilisation on the lens or in the body buys you a few stops of the same thing, not all of them.
Two lens filters earn their place in monochrome. A polariser cuts atmospheric haze, which is the classic way to push a distant ridge away from the foreground, and it darkens a blue sky before the camera ever desaturates it. A neutral density filter is not a monochrome tool, but it lets you use a wide aperture in bright light, which is the aperture you usually want for portraits.
Finally, save your monochrome settings as a custom picture style or custom picture control rather than dialling them in each session. Nikon and Fujifilm both let you register a custom profile, and Canon and Sony let you save a style to a slot. Forum regulars mention this constantly as the single time-saving trick: set it once, leave it selected.
Step-by-Step: The Camera Settings for Black and White Photography That Work
Work through these in order, then save the result as a custom style. Each step says what to set and how you can tell it worked, which is the part most guides skip.
1. Set the Camera to Capture Contrast and Detail
Shoot RAW and JPEG at the same time. The RAW keeps the full three-channel colour data so you can build your own greyscale conversion later, and the JPEG gives you an on-screen monochrome preview to compose with. If you only shoot RAW, the screen shows colour and you lose the composition aid, which is the main argument people make for in-camera monochrome in the first place.
Then select the monochrome picture style and raise its contrast. The default monochrome output on most bodies looks flat because it is a straight desaturation with no curve applied. One or two steps up makes the blacks sit down and the texture separate. You worked it out if the histogram spreads across the frame instead of piling up in the middle.
One caveat worth knowing: some cameras will not write RAW while a processing filter is active. If you switch to monochrome and suddenly the RAW option greys out, you have hit that behaviour. Leave RAW on first, set the monochrome style second, and the problem usually disappears.
2. Choose an Aperture That Suits the Subject
Aperture in monochrome does two jobs: it sets how much of the scene stays sharp, and it sets how much light you have to work with before touching ISO. There is no monochrome-specific rule here, only the ordinary depth-of-field trade-off.
For a portrait, open up to f/1.8 to f/2.8 and let the background fall away. Without colour to separate a subject from its surroundings, tonal separation matters more, and a shallow depth of field produces it for free. If you want more of the environment in the frame, f/4 is the popular compromise and usually sharp right through to the back of a head at normal portrait distances.
For architecture and most landscapes, f/8 to f/11 is where detail holds up across the frame. Beyond about f/16, diffraction softens fine detail and the picture gets worse even as more seems to be in focus. You will see f/16 recommended online as an Adams-style aperture for maximum sharpness, and it is diffraction-limited on every full frame body I have used. Stopping down is not free.
Sharpness peaks somewhere in the middle, usually between f/5.6 and f/11 depending on the lens, and the sharpest aperture is the one where the lens has less to correct. That question comes up constantly, and the honest answer is that it is lens-specific. Test your own glass at f/4, f/5.6, f/8 and f/11 on a high-contrast target and pick the winner.
3. Set a Shutter Speed That Stops Motion Blur
Shutter speed is where most accidental softness comes from. Here are the ranges I work from.
- Static subjects, tripod in use: 1/4s to 1s, wind permitting, with the ISO dropped to match.
- Handheld, people standing or moving slowly: 1/125s minimum as a floor.
- Handheld, walking and general street: 1/250s.
- Action and sports: 1/500s to 1/1000s, faster if your body allows.
- Water and moving texture: anywhere from 1/4s for a smooth wash to 1/1000s for frozen spray.
Handheld shake is less forgiving in monochrome than in colour, because grainy shadow detail masks it in a colour file and does not in a greyscale one. If a frame looks soft everywhere rather than soft in one place, that is shake, and the fix is a faster shutter or a steadier camera.
4. Set ISO for the Light You Have
Start at base ISO, usually 64 or 100 on modern bodies, and only raise it when the aperture and shutter speed leave you no choice. The temptation is to lift ISO first because it is the easiest dial to turn, and that gives away image quality you cannot get back.
That said, high-ISO grain in monochrome is a look, not only a defect, and plenty of photographers use it deliberately to mimic fast film. What changes is the ceiling. For portraits and anything you want clean, ISO 100 to 400 is comfortable and ISO 800 is usually still fine after a light noise reduction pass. For night street, ISO 1600 to 3200 produces a grainy result that most people accept; 6400 is where I start getting cautious and would switch to black and white deliberately rather than by default.
Noise also reads worse in monochrome than in colour, and the reason is worth knowing. Luminance noise is one signal, and a colour sensor averages it across three channels, which smooths it out. Convert to greyscale and you are left with the raw luminance error on its own, with no colour detail to hide it. Zone your exposure correctly and the noise becomes part of the texture instead of the subject.
5. Use Metering and Exposure Compensation
Evaluative or matrix metering works well for evenly lit scenes and fails in the two cases monochrome punishes hardest: backlit subjects and dark subjects against bright backgrounds. In both, it renders your subject as a flat mid-grey mass, which is the last thing you want when tone is the whole picture.
For a backlit portrait or a silhouette, switch to spot metering and meter off the background, then check the histogram before shooting. The subject goes dark on purpose, and in black and white that reads as a strong shape rather than as an error.
For everything else, keep the camera’s default metering and protect the highlights with between -0.3 and -0.7 EV of compensation. Clipping to pure white loses detail permanently. Clipping to pure black does the same thing, and because the darkest tones in a greyscale image all bunch together at zero, you can lose a surprising amount of shadow before the histogram blink indicators even warn you. Turn on highlight and shadow warnings if your camera has them, and check the histogram rather than trusting the screen, which lies in bright sun.
Photographers coming from film often reach for Ansel Adams here, and the Zone System still applies cleanly. Meter for Zone V, an 18 percent grey, and place your subject where you want it: Zone VII for bright skin, Zone III or IV for dramatic shadow, Zone I for a silhouette. The reason monochrome is the ideal place to practise this is that there are nine zones and no distracting colour to compete with them.
6. Focus Where the Story Begins
Pick one focus point and place it deliberately rather than letting the camera hunt across the frame. One-shot autofocus or AF-S with a single point works for portraits, still life and anything where the subject is stationary. Continuous autofocus, AF-C or Servo, is for movement, and pairing it with back-button focus keeps the focus point under your control instead of letting it jump.
Where you focus is a compositional decision. Portraits want the nearest eye. Architecture wants the plane that matters, since a straight-on wall at f/8 might need hyperfocal focusing to hold both near and far edges. Street and abstract work often want a hard edge or a texture rather than a face.
Manual focus with magnification has a legitimate place too. Anything involving glass, water or a scene shot at f/16, where depth of field is thin in spite of the number, is easier to nail down visually than by trusting a phase-detect module in low contrast.
7. Shoot With Intent and Review the Frame
The last step is the one that separates a grey snapshot from a photograph. Before you press the shutter, decide three things: what the subject is, where the light is coming from, and what you want the tones to do. Which shapes are going bright, which are going dark, and where does the eye enter the frame.
Then look at the frame in monochrome and ask whether it still works without colour. If a red coat was the only thing holding your attention and the picture falls apart without it, that frame is colour, and making it monochrome is decoration rather than a decision.
Review the result on the back of the camera before moving on. Check the histogram for clipping, zoom in at 100 percent to confirm focus landed where you intended, and look at the shadows for noise you could have avoided with a different ISO. The whole loop takes five seconds and it is where the next frame gets better.
Common Mistakes and How to Correct Them
Blown highlights. The most common failure and the least recoverable. Turn on highlight warnings, use a slight underexposure of a third to seven tenths of a stop, and check the histogram. In RAW you can recover a little; in a JPEG you cannot.
Shadows blocked to pure black. More common in monochrome than in colour, because the eye is drawn to an empty black corner. Lift exposure slightly or add fill light rather than crushing the blacks in post.
Images that look flat. Almost always a contrast problem. Raise the monochrome picture style contrast by one or two steps, add a filter effect, and make sure you are not underexposing by a stop in the hope of recovering it later.
Everything is soft. Three usual causes: shutter speed too slow for handheld work, aperture wide open at high ISO, or stopping down past f/16 and hitting diffraction. Check which one applies before changing anything else.
Noise that ruins the frame. ISO was raised before aperture or shutter were tried. Work through aperture and shutter first, then ISO last.
Believing white balance controls brightness in monochrome. This one is everywhere online and it is wrong as stated. What white balance does in a greyscale file is decide how the colour channels map to grey values, so it absolutely changes the result, just not through the brightness mechanism people describe. A frame shot at tungsten white balance and one shot at daylight white balance can differ noticeably in overall lightness because the raw-to-grey conversion shifts. What white balance does not do is act like an exposure control. Set it to Auto, lock it, and stop thinking about it.
Chasing f/16 for sharpness. Tempting advice that produces softer files. Stay between f/5.6 and f/11 unless you have a specific reason to go further.
Trusting in-camera monochrome as the final output. It is a composing aid and a preview. Your RAW file is the product, and most working monochrome photographers convert it themselves in software afterwards.
Frequently Asked Questions
What camera settings should I use for black and white photography?
Shoot RAW and JPEG together, set the picture style to Monochrome with contrast raised one or two steps, use Auto or Daylight white balance, keep ISO at base, and shoot in Aperture Priority. Add a red filter effect for skies and drop -0.3 to -0.7 EV to protect highlights. Save it as a custom style so it is one selection away next time.
Does it matter what white balance I use in black and white photography?
More than most guides admit, though not for the reason you have probably heard. White balance does not act as an exposure control in monochrome. It decides how the colour channels convert to grey values, so changing it can shift overall lightness and the balance between coloured objects. Pick Auto or Daylight, make sure you know which one is selected, and stop adjusting it per frame.
Is f/2.8 or f/4 better for isolating a subject in black and white?
For portraits, f/2.8 gives you a cleaner tonal separation between subject and background, which matters more once colour is gone. f/4 is the safer choice if you want the face and shoulders sharp while still softening the background, and it lets in more light. Most portrait shooters land somewhere between the two and check the back of the camera at 100 percent.
Should I shoot black and white in camera or convert RAW in editing software?
Do both, and they serve different purposes. In-camera monochrome gives you a preview to compose with and stops you chasing colour. Converting a RAW file yourself gives you the tonal range and colour channel control that a compressed JPEG preview cannot. Experienced shooters on photography forums consistently describe the camera setting as a composing aid rather than a finished output.
Do the in-camera red, yellow and green filter effects actually work?
They are a genuine simulation of physical black and white film filters, and the principle is the same: the filter lightens objects of its own colour and darkens complementary colours. Red darkens blue skies and lifts clouds, yellow lightens skin slightly, green brightens foliage. A polarising filter does something different, cutting atmospheric haze, and it works just as well in monochrome.
How do I stop my black and white photos clipping to pure black?
Check the histogram rather than the screen, turn on highlight and shadow warnings, and meter for the subject rather than letting evaluative metering average a dark subject into the background. Add a third to seven tenths of a stop of exposure compensation to lift the shadows, and use Zone V metering so your dark areas sit in Zone II or III instead of Zone I.
Conclusion: Start From One Reliable Baseline
If you do nothing else, set these on your next outing: RAW plus JPEG, the Monochrome picture style with contrast at +1 or +2, Auto white balance, base ISO, Aperture Priority, evaluative metering with -0.3 EV, and a red filter effect if there is sky in the frame. That is a complete answer to what camera settings for black and white photography need to be.
Everything after that is adjustment, not correction. Open up for portraits, stop down to f/8 for wide scenes, speed the shutter when things move, and raise ISO only when the light leaves you no other move. Then check the histogram, and go look at the scene properly without colour distracting you.