Then in PS I can pay more attention to curves and contrast and finer color balance if I have successfully captured it from the scan.
Now the 21st century thing to do would be to do each of these adjustments to a layer, but I started with Aldus Photostyler for editing scans if that dates me. (Aldus was swallowed by Adobe in 1994) I adjust each color as the scan is rarely accurate with regard to light and dark for each color. I scan B&W film in as color too, since the pyrocat stain is a color unto itself and throws the blue channel off to one side a bit. The right side of the histogram is white, left is black. I like some black or close to black in many photos. I don't often have pure white though; nothing is super bright white in the photo and avoiding clipping the white produces some natural realistic look, particularly as most people's monitors are too bright. If you were printing, you can't print pure white anyways on the inkjet, so keeping it off white is practical. Why does setting the light and dark for each color produce decent color balance? Because white is a even mix of colors and black is an even mix of colors (in pigment, but not in transmittive). That leaves room for error in the middle, but that's super easy to correct with a minor curve adjustment in whatever color is off or using the color balance sliders which I won't demonstrate.
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