Thanks for the help and possible solutions.

I do not intend to buy _any_ proprietary software. Sorry, that dinosaur is dead.

Unfortunately, the info is not quite what i need: i blame this on my own missing information.

The scanner is attached to a WinNT4 box (the last Win i have bought a license for - and the last Win i will ever install) with a bare-bone scanning program, not able to do anything but import raw TIFF's.

The reason is, under Linux/SANE, the scanner's backend (a rather rare Microtek Scanmaker 4) do not support transparent scans - i have discussed it with the earlier maintainer, but he's quit, and nobody supports the scanner anymore. I have tried to find the bug in the code, but so far, no luck.

So, i can import a raw, negative TIFF to my linux box... I found out that i can compensate for the filter with the colour settings (these vary with film brand), and i can 'stretch' the B/W greyscale range, both functions using GIMP.

Now i just need to write a shell script to automate the task, as i'm per definition rather lazy...

Thanks for your attention and help - Kim 'The_Pirate'