[philippe]

Why are B&W RAW files taken with the K20D set in B&W mode via the FN -> Custom Image, opened as COLOUR RAW files in Light Room 2.4? The same happens in Bridge CS3 and PS. It is as all the B&W info is gone and replaced by colour. I know that in B&W mode, the files are still RGB, but B&W in RGB is not that exceptional...
It looks like shooting B&W is rather virtual, for the PP software at least.

The files are not in-camera processed and when I review the pictures on the camera's LCD screen, they appear in B&W.

When shooting, 'thinking in B&W' is not the same as done in Colour.

[Plankton]

It's probably a lightroom thing, I had the same thing happen to me with my D40 shoting in B&W with lightroom 3. I would be interested to hear the answer to this one also.

-Javin

[Marc Sabatella]

Why are B&W RAW files taken with the K20D set in B&W mode via the FN -> Custom Image, opened as COLOUR RAW files in Light Room 2.4?

Because a RAW file is exactly that - one in which JPEG image processing settings like the B&W mode have not actually been applied. The original image is always captured in full color regardless of what JPEG image processing options you've chosen in camera. Some RAw processing programs may look at the information recorded in the EXIF and thus notice you had set your JPEG image processing options to B&W, and therefore apply B&W processing by default as well, but in general, only the camera manufacturers' own RAW processing software will understand *all* the different in-camera JPEG image processing settings and know how to reproduce their effect.

There might be an option you need to enable in LR to get it to pay more attention to those in-camera JPEG image processing settings, but if not, you'll just have to get LR to do the conversion from color to B&W itself. Which is just as well - it gives you *far* more control over the process than the camera's JPEG image processing engine does.

It looks like shooting B&W is rather virtual, for the PP software at least.

Yes, of course - *all* JPEG image processing settings are virtual when shooting RAW.

Why would you want the camera to shoot B&W anyway? You can do a much better conversion in almost any program.

If the file didn't have the RGB information, there wouldn't be a lot of PP that could be done using the software.