filmscanners: Scanning negs and white spots

[Rob Geraghty]

I (and others) have noticed scanned negs tend to show a lot of white spots
which don't seem to be caused by dust on the surface of the neg.  Since
the image is inverted, presumably the spots are dark or black (opaque) on
the neg itself.  Without ICE, this makes for a lot of work in scanning a
film.

I suspect that it's from a couple of possible causes:
1) Dust bonded into the neg during processing
2) spots of undeveloped neg emulsion caused by bubbles during processing

I don't think I had any such features on B&W film I processed myself by
hand, but I'd have to check.  Is this yet another downside of mechanical
processing of C41 in minilabs?  Dust in the chemistry and bubbles on the
film?  Does anyone have a clearer idea of the cause(s) of these spots? 
The white spots in negs seem to be much more frequent than black spots in
slides (which in my experience almost always *are* dust that can be cleaned).

Rob


Rob Geraghty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://wordweb.com