Digital BW, The Print

Steve writes:

> Should I be doing more than working with the
> equivalent of levels and curves at the scanning
> stage?

Your current strategy seems correct to me.  You should use the scan
exclusively to extract as much data from the film as possible.  Once you
have the data, you can do anything you want in Photoshop.  There is no
reason at all to tweak anything on the scan itself except to try to match
the scan capacity to the film, i.e., ideally you want the film density range
to fall right in the middle of the scanner's density range, if possible (if
the film density range exceeds what the scanner can handle, then you'll have
to scan as much as you can and accept the loss of the rest).

In practice, I don't bother tweaking the scanner much, as it handles
autoexposure itself and usually centers its gain on the density range of the
film to the extent possible.  In practice, then, it is already getting quite
a bit of the available information from the film.

I don't tweak colors or anything in the scan software, as there is no
advantage to it and it takes too long to see the results.  I just fix it all
in Photoshop.