Digital BW, The Print

Hi everyone, I've been a lurker in this group for a while, but haven't
posted much.

I'm looking for some opinions on a dust and scratch removal program
for scanned black and white film. I haven't been able to find anything
that was really helpful in this regard, and got to thinking about
creating something myself.

In some ways what I'm planning on developing would be similar to the
Polaroid Dust removal program, but would make use of more
sophisticated image analyis techniques. By this I mean, it would take
into consideration the amount of film grain present (via the speed of
the film and allowing the user to specify a level of "graininess").
The size of of the film grain with respect to the size of the actual
image on the negative would also figure into the dust/scratch
selection algorithms.

This program would not be smart enough for you to set a couple of
options and then presto you'd have something as clean as a Digital ICE
repaired piece of color film (That seems unlikely for now). But would
offer significantly less work than going through your file with the
clone-stamp tool or the healing brush at 100% pixel resolution in
Photoshop as I've usually done with my B/W scans. This whole process
started after I spent about 2 hours cleaning up a scan of a 35mm Tri-X
neg with the PS CS healing brush. By manually applying some of these
techniques I was able to clean a similarly dirty neg in about 15
minutes. I expect that I can build a PS CS plugin to do this
relatively simple stuff without too much trouble. But the really cool
benifit will arise if my ideas regarding automated dust and scratch
identification pan out.

This probably wouldn't be of need to those who only have to clean up 5
or 6 defects per image. I'm talking about really messed up negs with
over 100 defects per image!

So here are my questions:

1. Would such a program would be of interest to you B/W scanning
types?

2. If so would most of you be interested in a standalone application,
or a Photoshop plugin that would work with 16-bit files? If I were to
build a standalone program I would only code it to work with TIFF
files.

3. What percentage of those interested are on Macs vs PCs?

Thanks, Derek