goido- Best way is to not have any noise! You might try playing around with the contrast and brightness setting on the scanner to get more range in the darks, you can always reverse the adjustments in Photoshop. Part of the problem is most (all?) scanners use a lineal gamma curve, which makes the darks too close togeather, so they tend to block up. If you've got a old 24 bit scanner you might want to think about getting a new 32 or 36 bit scanner, the main advantage of the extra bits is more dark detail.