Digital BW, The Print

--------
[I posted this message on the Piezography list a few days ago; as I have ot had any responses there, I am reposting this message here]
-------

On the Imaconusers forum someone posted an interesting message stating that for Piezography printing he scans with his Imacon 848 the following way in order to get the longest possible tonal range:

-scan into into 16-bit grayscale rather than RGB
-set the the histogram to -2 black and -2 white and manually adjust the curves
-gamma set at 1.8

Of course this does result in a long-tone scan but needs substantial adjustment work in Photoshop. Also, the Preview does not match the Final Scan because the Imacon scanning software does not provide for inclusion of profiles in grayscale scans. But this obviously does not matter in this type of scanning workflow when one is going for the longest tonal range possible. He states that scanning at 1.8, rather than the 2.2 most people use, gives the best reproduction and the greatest control over seperating different tones.

My own scanning workflow with my Imacon PII is to scan into 16-bit RGB at gamma 2.2 and then to use Channel Mixer in Photoshop when converting to grayscale.. In addition, I make curve adjustments and use the gray eyedropper tool to set neutral tones in the Imacon software. Then I make final adjustments in Photoshop. Perhaps the grayscale scanning workflow outlined above is better for Piezography workflow than my RGB workflow because the Preview image in the Imacon software is not as accurate as that of Photoshop.

If you have experience with Imacon scanning or similar exoperience with other scanning software, please let me have your reaction.

--Mitch/Bangkok