Black & white recipes

The four black and white modes

Every color GR has the same four. Monotone is the balanced, full-scale one and the base for most everyday street recipes. Soft Monotone is low contrast with the shadow detail kept, the classic base for a sepia look. Hard Monotone is punchy with deep blacks, the street default with grain at 2 or 3. Hi-Contrast B&W is the extreme: Ricoh compares it to ultra-high-sensitivity film or push processing, with blocked shadows, glowing highlights and a grainy feel built in.

All four drop the Saturation and Hue sliders and add three controls the color modes do not have: Toning, Filter Effect and Grain.

Filter Effect, Grain and Toning

Filter Effect is numbered Off and 1 to 4 on the camera. No Ricoh manual gives the numbers color names, and the decodes that circulate online disagree with each other, so the recipes here print the number the creator used and nothing more. Grain on the GR III generation is Off, Weak, Medium or Strong (the camera shows -, 1, 2, 3); the GR IV adds a size setting. Toning tints the print; its scale differs by mode and body, so follow the recipe's value as written.

White balance still matters on a color body shooting black and white, because it feeds the conversion before the tone curve. Creators use it as a fake color filter: a warm 10000K reference shifted toward magenta darkens a blue sky the way a red filter does on film, and a 2500K reference shifted toward blue does the opposite. Several recipes on this page run exactly that.

On the GR IV Monochrome

The Monochrome has no Filter Effect and no white balance, so neither trick above exists on it. Its physical red filter in the lens does the sky-darkening job instead, at a cost owners measure at roughly two stops. Its own modes (Standard, Solid, Soft, High Contrast, Grainy, HDR Tone) are not renamed copies of the four above; the walkthrough on each recipe page maps Monotone to Standard and Hard Monotone or Hi-Contrast B&W to High Contrast, and owners who A/B the High Contrast pairing find the two nearly indistinguishable. The Image Control guide has the full slider reference.