Carmine,
Excellent portrait of your son!
David, to answer your question in two ways: Firstly, in the example I gave, I used Sagelight Image Editor (very nice package I recommend - is a low-cost Photoshop replacement to some degree, even running PS plugins).
When I scan, I start with the automatic histogram adjustment, and may do a little more adjustment if necessary (for instance, if some highlights are blown, I may pull them back out by adjusting the various controls as shown below). I save as grayscale 16-bit. I've tried 48-bit color with my B&W images, but the files are bigger and I don't see any higher quality that way. I scan at 2400 dpi as that is as much resolution as the scanner can really produce (may be closer to 2000 dpi realistically), but that works for me. I go through each negative in the film holder, tweak the histogram, then start the scanning process. After scanning, I usually adjust a little further in Faststone or Sagelight while cropping and resizing. I don't sharpen at scan time because I figure that is better done later on in post processing after resizing to final size. I scan to TIFF files for better "raw" quality, and archive those TIFFs.
Here is how I set up the Epson scan software with my V500:
Here is the result I tweaked a little bit in Faststone (adjusted histogram levels, leveled, cropped, resized, sharpened after resizing):
(My granddaughters, Pentax MX, Pentax-M 40mm f2.8, Tri-X @ 1600 in Rodinal 1+100 60 minutes stand, if I remember correctly!
I missed focus on this one because it was a quick snapshot.)
-Joe-