Digital BW, The Print

Walt,

Some good advice already by others here, I have something critcal to add 
(see 4th paragraph). I have been going through the same thing with an old 
library of over 2500 BW 35mm images (Tri-X) I shot during the 70's  and been 
finding scratches and dust galore!

I don't know if your film is old or newly shot but I have deduced the scratches 
on my old film most likely came from (A) a bulk roller with dust in the felt (B) 
bulk cartridges used one too many times (C) less-than-professional darkroom 
processing (all fingers point to me).

In preparig to print this BW work, often for the very first time, it has been 
shocking to see amount of dust and scratches. At one point I picked up one of 
the few vintage 8x10 prints I still had around and examined it under a loupe 
trying to see if it had ALL these scratches and dust that the negative(s) 
seemed to suddenly now have. And you know what, under the loupe, I did 
find the same spots, though more subdued and not at all visible to the naked 
eye. The digital world brings out the defects much more readily and I've come 
to the conclusion that the old school analog stuff seemed a bit more forgiving 
to the making of BW prints.

Back to solutions: 
I don't believe no one has mentioned it, but if you're going to use the healing 
tool, do it in Photoshop 7.0 *NOT* CS1 (version 8). I don't know if things got 
better in CS2 because I haven't upgraded yet. But the speed of v7 over v8 for 
spotting images using the healing brush is simply blazing. Note I am talking 
about the Mac versions of Photoshop and not sure if the same applies to Win 
versions too.

And as someone else mentioned, it's important to spot at 100% and nothing 
under that. 

I know with Macs that by maxing the RAM out on the machine it will feel like 
you upgraded the processor. Maximum memory will help no matter what 
platform you're using.

Best,
Craig