Scanned in Negatives

Below are 6 x 6 negatives that were scanned in. The top image is the BEFORE it was airbrushed, the one below is the AFTER.
The background was not white enough, it was grey, so I used the dodge tool to brighten the background, and then I burned the image of the subject to make it look more high contrast, because it was supposed to be a recreate an image by David Bailey.

Also, I was asked a question by Diane in class which I could not answer - the question was "what is the first thing you do when you scan in a negative?" The answer was to create a copy of it, or something like that, in the layers. The reason I could not answer this question was because when I work on images in Photoshop, I have always done it a different way, I always have a copy of the original somewhere on my laptop, or I after I finish working on the image, I always 'save as' it as something else, and never as the original.