So I've got a few negatives that are pretty thin, I'm scanning with an Epson 4990 and use Photoshop. There are lots of light specs and dust hits (mostly specs, smaller since it's 8x10) I've tried playing around with the dust/scratches filter, median, and a bunch of other, but I'm never really able to get a satisfactory results without a good amount of masking to locally 'undo' the filtering in parts of the image that end up looking bad. (dulicating the main layer, filtering the duplicate, then masking the badly filtered areas to show the original scan)

I'd love to hear peoples photoshop workflow for thin negatives have thin negatives with lots of specs in the shadows. Are there any plugins that do better than what photoshop can natively? Or does is just come down to filtering, then masking out by hand the parts where the filtering gets to much? I'm not afraid to spend some time working with it by hand, but if there are some methods/techniques that will save a bit of time, I'd be interested in hearing them