I took Peter's suggestion and scanned these at 600 resolution and played with them for a bit. Is it possible to get more detail (smoother skin, less noise, etc) than my results? Thanx everybody for your help.

Geezer... I moved your thread and retitled it. Hopefully someone who knows a lot more about scanning than I do will be able to advise.

djr

first depends on what scanner your using
second turn off all auto controls and anything that auto fixes scratches


this will help improve detail greatly
unless you have a poor quality scanner or if its old

hope this helps you zganie

Thanx for the help. I took your advice and was pleasantly surprised with the improved results. This ol' dog is still learnin' new trix....

If you are using CS3 Extended you can take 4 or 5 scans and use the stacks feature and it will eliminate the scanner noise (since noise is random it takes the color values from several frames and doesn't add the pixels that are different) the result is a noiseless scan. The limitation is the film grain, as that isn't random and is developed in the film. Works great on digital photo's too!

Tutorial (http://photoshopnews.com/2007/03/27/image-stacks-in-photoshop-cs3-extended/)(towards the bottom)

If you do use auto correct make sure you select inside the photo edges, if you get a bit of white edge it will throw the auto correction on the histogram.

Was the alex02 photo scanned from an inkjet print? there seems to be a lot of banding on the print...unless that was from the scan.

interesting technique, but i wonder how well it would work with a high-end drum scanner...