Originally Posted by
Sasquatchian
Alan - I don't know what your level of comfort is with Photoshop. The best way tone your black and white scan is with a series of Adjustment Layers. Curves is almost always the best tool as it allows you to have more control over the tonality of the image than any other tool in Ps. You can orient the Curves dialog so that the shadows are at the lower left and the highlights are at the upper right. That should be the default but not always and old time pre-press guys like them to be the opposite.
I usually start out with a fairly simple Curve that just sets highlight and shadow points (using the Color Sampler Probes in the Info Palette) and maybe hits a bit of overall tonality. Then I move to more targeted Adjustment Layers, making the adjustment, then immediately filling the mask of the Adjustment Layer with Black, then slowly painting that adjustment back in using an appropriate brush. By painting on the mask, you can not make a mistake, painting in the adjustment with white and painting it back out with black.
The advantage of Curves over Levels is that you can target any part of the tonal range and use up to 16 adjustment point on the Curve to make fairly complex and effective corrections. You can lighten an area while simultaneously adding contrast exactly how YOU want to and not be severely limited by the three control points of Levels.
There are many youtube tutes out there about how to use Adjustment Layers, but the basic idea is that with an Adjustment Layer is infinitely undoable and does not permanently apply its adjustment until you finally flatten all the layers of the image. Which, of course, I don't recommend that you do. Generally keep a layered Tiff or .psb file if your files are larger than 4 gb and save off a copy for printing or online distribution. There is very little reason to ever use the native .psd Photoshop format anymore as tiff does everything that .psd will do except make duotone, tritones and quadtones for offset press and tiff doubles the file size limit of .psd from 2 gb to 4 - and lets you save with zip compression on both background and layers if you want which results in longer save times but a smaller file than .psd.
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