Digital BW, The Print

> > I scan my B&W negatives on a Nikon 8000.  Settings are monochrome 
and> > grayscale in 8-bit.
> 
> Why 8 bit? I scan B&W in RGB.

Why 8 bit indeed!
An 8 bit RGB image has about 24 millions colors, while an 8 bit 
grayscale has 256.  Do you really want to limit yourself to a .gif 
quality file?  And that's before you do any pixel-destroying mods to 
the file.

Try to scan at 16 bit, setting the white and black point in the 
scanner software.  Then in Photoshop do your major tonal 
adjustments.  PS has very truncated function at 16bit, but you can do 
most basic things.  No layers, though, that's the worst part.  When 
you are working grayscale the file will not even be as big as an 8bit 
RGB file of the resolution.

If you must resort to filters or tools that don't work in 16 bit you 
can always dumb down to 8 bits at the end and do them then.  In 16bit 
you cannot make a varied selection (like lasso, magic wand etc) but 
there is a technique of using an 8bit duplicate of the file to make 
alpha channel masks and load them into the 16bit as elections...works 
great!

The point about using an RGB scan to do a channel mix is a good one, 
if you are going from a color sourse.  So scan 16bit RGB (BIG file), 
do the channel mix early and then go down to grayscale from then on.  
You could even work on an 8 bit copy of the master to test amounts 
and simply write down the mix numbers to use on the master.

Ernest Burden III