I recently developed an image of a person playing guitar on a 8x10 print. The person was wearing a black hooded sweater so alot of the image is black with the exception of part of his face/his hand/and the bottom of the guitar. This is intentional as it adds mood to the image. I have a cheap scanner packaged with my printer (its not flatbed). If I scan the images while trying to get the black parts black. I get missing parts of the face (parts that are shadowed). If I try to get the face to show in the image, the black parts are gray and faded.
I am wondering if a more expensive flatbed scanner would pick up a greater range of shades in the image, or will I be forced to labor with this image in photoshop (even tho the print is perfect).

Anthony - see the thread about neg scanning that has more info on scanners - basically you need a scanner with the highest possible DMAX your purse strings will stretch to in order to capture a greater dynamic range of colour and contrast. currently i believe the best you can get on a home user scanner is around the 4 DMAX setting at best.

I'm not really interested in buying a negative scanner, or any scanner thats toooo expensive. But we do have some printer flatbed combos at best buy that I am looking at. Its not that important to me to scan my prints. I'll get back to using a digital camera and posting everyday soon enough. Besides, theres always photoshop :-p

I will *guarantee* you that you are within walking distance of a slide or very high quality flatbed scanner daily. At a university the size of the one you go to, especially if you have an art or architecture department, there will almost certainly be such a thing. You just need to find and chat with the right people. We used to have several good-quality flatbeds available for student use, and a great slide scanner which wasn't *supposed* to be used by anyone but the library, but if you had a friend, it wouldn't be a problem (if you catch my drift).

good call, I think I'll drop my prints off at the library and see how they turn out