It looks like it does pretty much everything I need, but I’m having some trouble getting the colours correct. I’m getting a slight purple tinge on the sample photo I’m using. It might just be that I need to learn how to do it through XSane, so I’m having a play with the settings.
Descreening helps to get rid of the old newspaper effect that newspapers and some old documents had. It’s not usually needed for photos, but I’ve got some clippings from newspapers, and some very old documents with the effect.
Backlight Correction basically just brings up the brightness in a photo, but rather than just cranking up the exposure or brightness, it seems to do the equivalent of bringing the detail from shadows in Photoshop. It’s not great, but now and then it does a good enough job that I don’t have to open a photo editor.