I generally scan and do the brightness/contrast adjustments in Photoshop. So I'd actually suggest you invest the time to learn at least basic Photoshop. You wouldn't need to learn all the fancy stuff to do simple coloring.

When he uses Paint so far, he might have an easier time giving a shot at
- Krita ( less complex ),
- MyPaint ( more powerful than paint but still in the same range on complexity ) or
- Gimp.

After all, Photoshop is costly and he'S not going to train as a commercia ldigital artist where his employer would insist on him using Photoshop.

Good contenders are also
- Paint.NET
- LazPaint

Okay Roz. You've persuaded me to try and revise my old e-Machine which has Photoshop 4 on it, but one problem is it has been laying in "Vacation" mode for almost four years. Any advice on waking it up?

Looking into LazPaint too.

Paint 3D is not the app you need. You need something that will handle contrast and sharpness.
Google Photos will do a lot of what you want including cropping, colour, contrast and brightness balancing, and also storage, and other useful features.
It's free to use if you sign up for a Gmail account or other Google account.

Aha. I have Google Photos on my laptop. I'll certainly look into that.

You might try these free utilities:
PhotoScape http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/index.php
Paint.NET https://www.getpaint.net/

PhotoScape is very easy and intuitive to use but mostly geared to photo manipulation. Paint.NET has a somewhat steeper learning curve but it is much more flexible and adaptive, and there are tons of plug-ins for your specific needs. I use PdN for just about everything -- and I have both Adobe PhotoShop Elephants and Corel PaintShop Pro.

You're better off using whatever software goes with the scanner to generate the raw file and then import it into your graphics program.

And I concur with GIMP. Learn to use that, and you can use your skills to transition to other graphics apps.

Ask Baron Engel wife.

Oh yeah! 'Cause Baron does pencil work the same way I'd like to. Thanks.

She does all of hers and his printing

Set scanner contrast to a compromise between line visibility and "dirtiness" of the blank paper. It will take a bit of trial and error to find the magic number here, but you want the paper to be as clear as possible while still being able to see the pencil lines. It's easier to darken the lines than it is to eliminate murk picked up from the paper surface; contrast adjustments are best done in your editing software rather than your scanner utility.

Download GIMP. It's free and it does everything you need. The best way to adjust contrast is with the "levels" tool. Set the image mode to grayscale and there will be only one level channel to deal with. It will look like a sonar graph, and for raw scans of pencil art there will probably be a hump or a bunch of spikes in the middle of the graph, and empty space at the left and the right. Use the mouse to grab the little sliders at the bottom of the graph (one at either end; ignore the one in the center - it will move automatically when you adjust the others). The leftmost one sets which tonal value will be displayed as "black" and the one on the right controls which value will be "white." Move them closer to where the bumps are on the graph, and your image's tonal range will compress, contrast will increase, lines will get darker while your blank paper gets whiter.

You'd think the "brightness / contrast" tool would be best for this, but in fact that tool sucks. Color Levels is the way to go.

I wouldn't scan any higher than 300 unless you're planning on printing. For internet I scale down all of my images so the largest dimension is 1000 pixels. Having the picture bigger than the screen just means people can't see it in a single glance, like it was intended to be seen.

See? This is the advice I was looking for. More "Wetware" related and not "Software" related.

On yours and the Major's recommendation, okay. I'll try GIMP one more time.

GIMP does what Photoshop can do, but .. it's not laid out as smoothly. Like ACe said below, you have to poke around with GIMP to figure out where the controls are for what you want to do. For simple stuff, it's pretty simple. I have not delved into its shadowy recesses to make it do fancy tricks, but for prepping line art, coloring line art, and tweaking photos it is a breeze to use.

The "levels" tool I was talking about can be found under the Color menu.

Also riffing off of ACe's comment, ink will always scan better than pencil. A cleaned-up ink you can scan in "bitmap" (or "threshold" mode on older scanner utilities) which reads each pixel as either black or white depending on a brightness threshold that some softwares let you set manually. So your lines will show up and the texture of the paper won't .. but your lines have to be darker than the threshold. All of my posted cartoons were inked on paper, scanned in bitmap at 300dpi, opened in GIMP, and under Image -> Mode I convert from "Indexed" to "Grayscale." Then I do finishing work on the image at 300dpi:

1. Crop image with crop tool.
2. Fill spot black with the bucket tool. (It is important to do this at the original scanned resolution since resizing causes aliasing of line edges, and GIMP's fill bucket does not handle this well. You get little gray "Bailey's Beads" around the edges of your fill if you do it after resizing.)
3. In the rare instances that I use gray tones, I either use the fill tool or I add a layer (mode set to "Multiply") and use the lasso select tool to draw friskets and fill them with the Edit -> Fill with FG Color command.
4. Use halftone filter to turn gray tones into dot screens if I'm in the mood for dots.
5. Once all the finishing work is done, Image -> Scale Image so the long side is 1000 pixels. (If both dimensions are already less than 1000 skip this step since there's no point)
6. Use text tool to add my watermark (Patreon url)
7. Flatten Image and save as GIF .. people yell at me sometimes for using GIF but for line-art and even cel-shaded art this is still the best image compression since EVERY browser ever made for the last 25 years can display it with no problem, and it doesn't noise-up the image the way JPEG does. (use JPG or PNG for images with smooth shading: paintings, CG renders, or photos. GIF's dithering patterns will make smooth-shaded art look like garbage)

With regard to Microsoft, they are merely no longer including "Paint" as a pre-installed windows accessory. I don't know why that is since it is a tiny little program, or was when I used it, but microsoft will continue to provide it for free download. Or something like that. I still use Jasc Paint Shop Pro 6 from 1999 for various things, in windows 7, so I imagine more recent versions of microsoft designed software will continue to run for a very long time after they stop being updated.

The nuances of scanning have long seemed to work against me, so I know very little about that. I can say that scanning smaller than 300 is probably not a good idea if you intend to work over an image and print it out again, but I presume that is not what you seek to do, so smaller sizes are probably fine. I remember being surprised when I read that the Mad Magazine artist Tom Richmond only scanned his work at only 200 dpi for coloring, due to the low quality prints of the magazine. So then I naturally started scanning mine at 600! Now I hardly ever scan anything and am probably better off.

ALTHOUGH cartoonists often draw on paper much larger than what the pictures get reproduced on to, so scanning big paper at 200 is possibly just right for printing at 300 on to a smaller page.

Lots of good advice.

A clean original is ALWAYS Easier to cleanup than starting with a messy image, no matter what program you use. Even a basic once-over ink or an ink-on-pencil and then erase the pencil, and you'll be way better off for the work involved.

Lots of good advice so far. Personally, I use either PaintShop Pro Paleozoic edition (a.k.a. JASC era, V.5), or GIMP. Word on GIMP: It's weird. It's great and it can do just about anything Photo Shop can do... but getting there frequently involves hidden commands, counter-intuitive menus, and/or poorly documented features.
STEEP Learning curve, but once you climb that, it's a very capable, very decent program. Good, just idiosynchratic.
Oh yeah, and is free.

My thoughts. Hope that helps.