Digital BW, The Print

Jean-Marc Humbert writes:
 > Dear all:
 > 
 > I've been using the Nikon Coolscan ED 4000 for 18 months [...]
 > 
 > After hundreds of scans (with different kind of negatives and
 > different ways of process), I am still disappointed with:
 > 
 > - the poor histograms I obtain in PS
 > - the gap in shadow area (from 0 to 25/30, no data at all!) which is 
 > quite annoying for printing with the PiezographyBW plugin since it 
 > requests strong blacks...
 > 

Here's a site that talks about the problems scanning negatives on the
LS8000.  My LS4000 exhibits the same behaviour.

http://www.marginalsoftware.com/LS8000Notes/autoexposure_not_working.htm

For black and white, I've had good luck scanning as a positive (which
gives me an inverted image) and then flipping it in Photoshop (usually
using the levels dialog to invert it and set the black and white
points at the same time, curves is cool too, but simply inverting
sometimes is "icky".).

I find color corrections challenging when I'm flying by the seat of my
pants, so I've had less success w/ this approach for color negs.

I can get Vuescan to give me ok results, but I'm hampered a bit
because I'm tied to MacOS 8.x and am therefor running an older version
of vuescan.  I'm worried about keeping my Leaf45 running if I upgrade
to 9.x, so...

g.