Given that the main purpose of demosaicing is to recover colour as accurately as possible, would there be any advantage to a "black and white only" demosaic algorithm? That is, instead of first recovering the colour and then converting black and white, might it be better to convert the RAW file directly to black and white?
I'm particularly interested in the image quality (e.g. dynamic range and sharpness). On a related note, which common demosaicing algorithms are most amenable for black and white conversion?
Answer
There is no way to convert a RAW file directly to black and white without recovering the colour first, unless your converter takes only one of the R,G,B pixel sets to produce an image. This approach would result in a substantial loss of resolution.
In order to not lose resolution when converting to black and white you have to use all R G and B pixels, which implicitly means colour calculations must be performed, at which point you might as well use one of the advanced colour demosaicing algorithms, and then convert the result to black and white.
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