Digital BW, The Print

Better minds than mine must have thought about the following long before 
I started wondering:

A lot of the functions in Photoshop rely on the principle that color and 
greyscale are represented in the pixel information and the distribution 
of the pixels. When grain is resolved in color or B&W above the level of 
1 pixel per grain say at 4 or 6 pixels per grain there's another method 
of color and tone representation interfering with the pixel information. 
More extreme in contrasty images with coarse grain. Although the grain 
doesn't have all the properties of the true B&W screen in offset 
printing and the grainsize will pair size with density to some degree 
and doesn't have a hard edge, nevertheless there's information in that 
irregular screen that behaves differently to the information in the 
pixels it is build on. With the result that the more contrast and the 
bigger the grain the less control you have on tonality etc in Photoshop. 
Like having a true bitmap on top of a greyscale. The simplest example of 
that observation is when you brighten the shadows the grain there isn't 
getting much smaller but becomes more grey. In the highlights the grain 
will change its size as the density - size is more related. The 
histogram of a grainless image and one of a grainy image can show a high 
contrast for both while the grainy image isn't contrasty in general but 
only on its grain level. This doesn't imply that there's no editing 
possible but ignoring what happens seems impossible. Sharpening can 
decrease the brightness for example.
'
What is the way to cope with it without removing the grain ? Sure I can 
judge with my eyes on a calibrated monitor but even then there are good 
reasons to expect a different outcome from the print as the grain will 
go through that process in another way than its rasterisation to the screen.

Ernst