Very helpful advice from @Adam, didn't know you could do this.
Originally posted by savoche I believe @utak did something similar with the K-3. With any luck he might chime in with his experiences
Hi Savoche! Yes, I tried a month of daily in-camera settings adjustment and editing, including b&w photos with jpegs on my K-3. I tended to leave the camera settings on AWB, although I occasionally turned this off, and went manual - it didn't make a huge difference IMO. Each scene I'd photograph needed a different kind of adjustment depending on light, contrasts, shadows, bokeh, etc., so I gave up trying to finesse the settings before taking the photograph, and focused on using the in-camera settings to process the photos after they were taken.
What did make a difference was:
1. Under-exposing the image. I tended to dial in -0.7 EV on the exposure adjustment, sometimes going as far as -1.7 (e.g. in scenes with very strong contrasts, such as sunlight shining on shiny surfaces) when using the Av setting. This helped reduce over-exposing bright white areas - areas that could blow out when I used post-photo digital filters, e.g. bold monochrome.
2. I took colour photos and then applied some base parameter adjustments to the photos, and sometimes other in-camera colour filters (e.g. toy camera or retro), before converting to b&w. This is just the way I like to work; producing a colour image, with brightness, saturation and contrast adjustments to help give b&w photos the right balance, and then converting to b&w. Part of the reason I do this is I can get interesting b&w tints from colour photos by extracting nearly all the colours, but not 100% b&w. All this, of course, is much easier to do post-processing on the computer and not the camera's small screen!
The big lesson I learned was to spend time getting the right level of under-exposure using camera settings.
EDIT: In terms of specific settings, this photo in quite challenging light, was well received by the Daily in participants. You can see the settings I used in the EXIF data on the Flickr page