Digital BW, The Print

"Lew" <lew1716@...> wrote:
>
> The main & perhaps impossible problem I face is years & years of Tri-X & HP5 in D76 & related soups. 

I don't think you'll find any magic in any of the books that takes care of that.  I find applying various noise-type filters to a duplicate layer below the main one and then selectively erasing the parts that need softening in the top layer is about as good as it gets in terms of lessening the grain.

Of course, with plain "blue" skies you can use gradients to replace most  of the original grainy sky.  Very careful selection of the sky is one of the more labor intensive parts of working up a landscape image that has that type of problem.  

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com