I discovered the scanner I was using for these photos was a 3d scanner, and didn't scan black and white photos well at all. Tried to restore what I could in Photoshop but I don't really know what I'm doing :-P The contrast is totally stuffed..all the detail was lost while scanning.

One more..the cat jumping (Ivory) is completely white on the scan, but on the print it has all kinds of wonderful light furry tones...if anybody has time, could you possibly tell me how to fix this?

if you do have the option in the driver of your scanner like scan in billion of color,line art or b&W or 256 shade of gray ....whell take the 256 shade of gray you will get better result.

I thought a 3D scanner had something similar to a removable lid thus you can scan actual objects ( eg. yo-yos ) in addition to pictures and text. Although something happened to the second picture. I think some setting or driver is missing. For your scanner. Good luick. What type of scanner is it? Bsteph

It's a HP ScanJet 4300c and it is not configured correctly, nor is it using the proper software, this is why we are having so much trouble. Anyway I went back in the darkroom yesterday and did more prints off the same negatives (as I already got a set of prints when I had the negatives developed even though I hadn't ordered them) because I wasn't happy with what the photo processing company place had done with them. I'll post my better results later.