Vuescan questions - locking exposure

[welly]

Hi all,

Question about Vuescan. I'm trying to improve my scanning process and I think I'm close but have a question regarding locking the exposure.

http://i.imgur.com/5XVqGIw.jpg

I think this has some nice tones in it but I'm losing the bottom right. When I was using "lock exposure", I selected a part of the image which I thought was about the darkest area (the area that has gone to black). I understand that this will set that selected area as black. It's not quite what I wanted. I do want it to be dark but I want to retain some detail still. Can anyone give me some pointers on how I might select an area as the darkest part of the scan but not lose all the detail entirely?

Thanks!

[RawheaD]

You actually want to select just outside your frame to tell it where black is:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/ishootfilm/discuss/72157608204093047/

Of course, you can fiddle around with curves if you like, too.