Adjusting the color in a scan can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be. First let me say that I think that it's okay to change the colors, because in most of the 3rd rate magazines, the people in them look orange. People are not orange, and that's not the picture that the photographer took.
Second, these third rate magazines have poor printing quality. If you bought the first issue off the press, and someone bought the 20,000th issue, they wouldn't look the same. Those magazines don't have the strict quality control that a magazine like Playboy has.
Third, even if you use a good colorimeter to calibrate your monitor, that doesn't mean that whoever downloads your scans will have their monitor calibrated. What looks perfect on your calibrated monitor might look terrible on his uncalibrated monitor.
When I scanned a picture into Photoshop, the first thing I would do after cropping it would be to use the Kodak ROC filter on it.(a plugin for PhotoShop). This filter removes the reddish cast on the picture. This filter usually removed too much red and the picture looked bad. No problem, just fade the effect. I usually would fade it down to 0% and slowly increase the slider till I got what I was looking for. Once I got the best look from using the fade option, I would then open the levels histogram and adjust the sliders till I got what I wanted.
Next I adjusted the brightness and contrast, if the picture needed it. If I wasn't happy with the results, I would play around with the individual colors in the saturation adjustment box. Sometimes I'd need to adjust the color balance also.
Once that was finished, I'd clone out the imperfections, then I'd resize the picture to the desired size, then apply the unsharpen mask. That was usually it.
The thing to keep in mind, and this is the biggest time saver, is to know what adjustments and filters WON'T work. Once you learn that, you will save time and effort by not trying to make adjustments with those tools and finding that they don't help.
Anyway, I hope this helps.
