Digital BW, The Print

As a result of all of the posts over the last week about levels and 
grain, spent some time this afternoon experimenting with a scanned 
image that degrades easily -- a very dirty white door on a rotting 
old house.  It did appear that using curves rather than levels (16 
bit) did lessen image degradation considerably.  Is that an artifact 
of this particular scan or will hold generally?  The only problem 
with working in levels in 16 bit is that as you cannot use an 
adjustment level, there is no going back to revise what you have done.

Steve