Halftone scans should accommodate a 30 to 35% midtone press gain, allowing for the spread of ink (dots) in the press reproduction process. Unless proper adjustments are made in the prepress stage, images will reproduce darker and flatter than the original.

This can best be accomplished by using the "curves" menu and "unsharp mask" filters in Photoshop, or other image editing software. In the curves menu, a good rule of thumb would be to set the highlight dot at 2 or 3, the shadow dot between 85 and 90, and pull the weight in the midtones from a 50% dot to approximately 35%. This will give the image a "washed out" appearance. It's okay if highlight dots are dropped from non-detail whites.

To sharpen your image in Photoshop using the unsharp mask filter, good results can be achieved by setting the radius for 1.5, the threshold for 7, and sharpening in amounts of 50 (50, 100, 150, etc).