Black and white in viewfinder

GrahamW58

I much prefer to take b&w photographs, however I also want to save in RAW. If I used the effects setting I would see b&w in the viewfinder but the file would be jpeg. Is there a way to do so without using effects?

Thanks.

bruto

If you set the picture control to Monochrome, you will see black and white in the LCD screen in Live View and in the playback, but the file will still be saved in Raw form, and can be processed as any Raw file can.

GrahamW58

Well, that will teach me!

Rather than try a simple experiment, I must have pored over two different independent Nikon guides for 24hrs or more and didn't find the answer to that!

Thank you so much. Marvelous.

PBked

Hi @GRAHAW58,
Just an aside. By using RAW you can shoot in color and apply monochrome effects and then revert to colour if you wish. This can't be done with JPG.
PBked

GrahamW58

Thanks @PBKED, yes, I realise that. My issue was with being able to see an image in B&W to get a better impression of how it was going to appear after post-processing. As @Bruto says, the answer is in the LCD screen.

Cheers, Graham.

bruto

I should mention as a sort of post script that if the D5300 is similar to the D3200, the printed guide is woefully incomplete. The PDF file on the accompanying disk (also available from Nikon's web site) is more complete, though that is relative too. I've found a fair number of undocumented and poorly documented quirks in the D3200 that are discovered only by experimenting.

GrahamW58

Thanks. Yes, I ended up buying two books and cross checking between them. Often the information is there but not indexed in the way that I am expecting it to be.

There used to be a whole industry of technical writing to produce manuals, now most tech manufacturers seem to leave the detail to dedicated independents (oh... like Moose!).

Cheers, Graham