I've said before that I don't do anything special. Look back on this thread and you'll nice scans by most. And go on Flickr and you'll see more nice scans. Maybe you've only been looking at my ISO100 scans. My workflow has changed recently since I upgraded to an Intel Mac from an older PPC Mac. I can now use products like Lightroom 3 (Intel only) and edit in 48-bit with PS. But prior to that I had a simple raw editor and used an Open Source image editor. In a nutshell:
- Scan 135 and 120 on 9000ED, 4x5 on 4990 using VueScan
- Turn off all scanner augmentations to the image except ICE on color
- Adjust high/low in scanner and scan output as 48-bit TIFF-DNG
- Open file in raw editor. Make adjustments that tool offers. Save as a 48-bit TIFF with very light sharpening.
- Open in PS, spend time with the healing tool, adjust curves, burn/dodge as needed, editing non-distructively as much as I can (I'm not a PS whiz)
- Create a new layer and apply a warming or cooling tone to the image for some. Save file.
- Scale down image to screen size, save file as another name.
- Create a sharpening layer. Apply Unsharp Mask to some images and a Smart Sharpen to all
- Save as a JPEG 100% quality
Sometimes I don't even need to go to PS to finish the image. If it scanned pretty clean, the healing tool in LR3 is enough and I just output to screen with whatever sharpening it applies. But I like the healing tool in PS better and I like to be able to adjust the Unsharp Mask and Smart Sharpen to taste. I've over Smart Sharpen before and that's a an on-going learning process. So is that much different than anybody else?