Alan, Happy New Year to you too!
Like the others, I think you are doing very well. Looking through your images you seem to have achieved a pleasing and natural looking end result on almost all of them, and that is the most important thing. The workflow you describe shows the way this whole business
should work. So yeah, the short answer is - don't change anything! Well, not until (or if) you start encountering problems, that is.
To answer your question more specifically, there are many variables which may be the cause of people getting such varying degrees of satisfaction from negative film. These can include the particular scanner they are using, the scan software, the particular film, their level of understanding of what it takes to get the best scans from their scanner and software, the skill level they have with post-processing tools (e.g. Photoshop), their skill in making good exposures in the first place, whether they use fresh film (or for example tend to let it sit in a hot glove box for years before use), and possibly even the quality of the lab developing their film. One other very key factor in my opinion is that people's sensitivity to color varies greatly - i.e., some of us are just a lot picker than others! I can attest to the fact that I have gone through a couple cycles of first thinking I had good results, only to break through to a new level after trying something different and discovering improvements in color (more realistic, more "pop," etc.), better tonal gradation, better detail in the shadows or in the highlights, and so forth.
Now it seems that some are lucky enough that they just turn the scanner to "auto" mode and everything comes out fine! I have had that experience myself, but just as often I have encountered a particular type of film (or a particular roll, or even just one particular image on a given roll) that for whatever reason just can't seem to be cast into something natural looking - no matter how hard I try! Those experiences - and it is possible you will have them yet as you try other films - tend to cause people to rethink their workflow and question exactly what is going on in the process of converting a color negative scan into a quality positive image. I wish you luck in not having to go through that!
Like some others mentioned, I too have been trying out ColorPerfect lately, with hopes of getting a consistently good starting point from each scan; which I can then fine tune for best results with relatively minimal effort. The claim made by the author of that plugin is that the way color inversion has historically been handled - including the way it is done in Photoshop, and presumably in at least some scan software too - is mathematically incorrect, resulting in loss of "color integrity." This explanation makes sense to me when I look at scans that I just can't seem to correct. In these cases it is as if the colors have been so badly distorted or damaged that normal adjustments (such as curves, levels, etc.) are inadequate. The ColorPerfect plugin basically requires you to make a raw (linear) scan which bypasses your scanner's inversion-to-positive algorithm, as well as any and all other processes your software might be inclined to perform automatically. My current understanding (mostly what I gather from the whole "color integrity" concept) is that it is not the orange mask itself which is the problem, despite people's tendency to blame it. But rather it is how the inversion is performed, with the mask removal actually being almost trivial.
Anyway, maybe what is going on is that your scanner software just happens to be doing everything right! If so... well, I envy you! But I wish you good luck and continued scanning success.
Jeff
