For TGA-Tsurugi and a few others who inquired about scanning in and editing traditional media. There are, of course, many ways of going about it, but this is what has worked best for me personally. 

Here is the comparison of a blurry photo and a scan of an image.

Scanner Model: Canon LiDE 35 (8 years old now:D)                                      Photoshop (7 or CS both works)

1. To obtain the scan, I set the scanner mode at 300dpi on Colour Photo.

2. Go to Settings-> Set Fading Correction to “Hard”  (On default, images can scan in quite faded, so setting it to hard can reduce colour loss. But keep in mind, it will pick up all the dust and sometimes over-saturate the colours but that can be easily fixed.)

3. Everything else on the scanner, I leave at default, and scan.

4. Once image is obtained, I will clean off all the unwanted dust and textures in Photoshop with eraser and healing brush.

5. Now to adjust the colours.

6. For altering brightness, I go to Image->Adjustment->Curves.  On RGB, there are 4 channels. RGB itself is great at adjusting the light and dark. (Move the curve around with your mouse to test it out.)

7. For other colour adjustments, you can use the 3 other channels in Curves. (Red, Green, Blue.)

8. As mentioned before, scanning pictures under “hard” fading correction can oversaturate. To fix that, go to Images->Adjustment->Hue/Saturation. 

9. In the menu, there should be “Master” and also 6 other colours. You can choose to adjust the image entirely, or adjust selective colours.

And that’s pretty much the process for obtaining and editing a scan. 8)

Hope that helps!

Just to answer some questions in regards to reference books and such, this is the series I like to use the most.

If you google “背景ビジュアル資料” (Haikei visual siryou), you can find quite a few places that sell it. The particular one I’m using right now is Vol. 2, but there are many different installments with a variation of themes. <: (170pg-ish of photos)