I’d start by scanning at the highest resolution possible, using a lossless format so every grit and grain is kept. Then I go through the pixels one by one, tightening up exposure and sharpness only where the original light is genuinely off, never adding anything that wasn’t there. I never touch the mood or the little imperfections that tell a story – those scratches, that faded hat, the tiny cracks. After a clean scan, I keep the raw file as the master, maybe tweak a duplicate for display, but I don’t apply filters or AI “improvements.” The goal is a faithful digital twin, not a polished recreation. If a photograph’s original character is fragile, my job is to preserve that fragility, not erase it.

I’ve turned the scanner into a kind of light microscope for the grain. I keep the sensor at 48‑bit color, 100‑µm optics, and I run a quick test at 5000K, 6500K, then 7500K. The grain shifts subtly—cooler light makes the silver halide specks a bit darker, warmer light brightens the faint scratches. I pick the temperature that keeps the grain visible but doesn’t wash out the shadows. For exposure thresholds I use a hard‑copy reference of the plate and pull the histogram up to the 95th percentile. Anything above that, I tone down in the scan, but I never touch values below the 5th percentile because that’s where the original darkness lives. I jot the values in a little notebook—date, plate, temperature, exposure cut—just in case I need to explain a tweak later. That way the file stays organized for the moment, even if my desktop is a mess.