Digital BW, The Print

First of all, thanks to all of you for kindly reponding to my
ignorant questions on this.

I may be getting a bit off-topic here, since the forum is about the
print (and so please  
feel free to respond off-list if you think this is not relevant), but
I'm frustrated in my  
effort to get good prints by my ignorance about all the steps leading
up to the print. I  
don't have a background in computer art, so all this is still fairly
new territory for me,  
and I 
think I've hit a point in my scanning and printing efforts where my
ambitions exceed  
my limited technical know-how, and I realize I need to do a lot of
studying if I want to  
get the kind of results I'm hoping for. Apparently many or most of
the people on this  
list truly understand the finer technical points of scanning,
Photoshop color and  
contrast manipulation (not to mention Curves), histograms, profiling
of scanners,  
monitors, printers, the Zone System and so on. I really haven't
mastered these things  
yet and have been stumbling through, managing to make some good
photos but not  
understanding the key techniques. I realize I should know how to do
all these things,  
but I don't yet -- and would welcome suggestions about what websites
or books to  
read. I will continue 
studying the Vuescan manual, but I think I need some more basic
primers. Hope I  
don't have to start with a calculus course...

Basically what I've been doing until now is scanning 35mm negs and
slides through  
Vuescan on my SprintScan 4000 and then manipulating in VueScan until
I get a  
preview image that looks good on my Powerbook G4 screen (has anyone
successfully  
profiled one of these frustrating puppies? the image changes
depending on viewing  
angle, how long it's been turned on, 
etc.) and then going from there. I understand how to change black and
white points  
on a histogram in PS, but I don't know how to change it in Vuescan so
that the image  
isn't clipped -- as it often is. I had thought it was due to the
limitations of the SS4000  
that the highlights are often blown out and shadows are muddy, since
they're visible  
in my transparencies. Glad to know it's not  the scanner's fault, but
I'm still not totally 
clear on how to change the histogram so  that the various lines don't
run up the side 
(clipping, right?)... I've tried changing the  selection in the Image
Curve pulldown on 
the Color tab, but often that just causes the  values to become even
more bunched up 
to one side, and the image looks terrible.

Also I have been scanning with Media Type set to Image, but some
function  
somewhere is still changing the colors for me so that I'm not getting
colors similar to  
what I see on the slide. Should I avoid using Restore Colors and
Restore Fading? Using  
my ignorant WYSIWYG approach, it seemed to me that turning those off
gave me gray,  
low-contrast images, but I guess only the histogram should matter and
not what I see  
in Vuescan, right?

Anyway, I'm willing to spend an hour to get each image looking right;
I would just like  
to have a method so I'm making good use of that hour.

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Stan McQueen
<stan@s...> 
wrote:

> Scanning color slides, I set media type to "Image" as you said. I
don't 
> tweak the histogram other than to see that it's not being clipped.
My 
> typical settings for black and white points are 0 and 1
respectively. This 
> usually ensures that I get all the info from the film into the
computer.
> 
. . .
> Stan