General settings of what? If in Epson scan, play with the settings and look at the changes in the 'Tone Curve Viewer' in the screen you supply above. '1' should be no gamma and linear, 18 or 2.2 would be 'normal'. You may have a completely different way of seeing the picture in your mind from what someone else might choose - your correction might be very different from mine. And your intention plays a big part in all this.

Then gamma is applied to adjust the values of the image to vision. In the above example that would look like a full histogram window with values from left to right edges and not a clump in the middle as shown. I personally think that you're almost always better off getting a full luminance range on input. On the other hand once you get all the information into the computer you do have a good bit of lee-way in distributing the values. Just like adjusting the negative to fit your darkroom paper, its a good idea to adjust the negative to your scanner through a personal testing process. In settings such as above, obviously the film densities are going to have a large influence on what is captured, so I don't think there is a set answer that fits for all negatives, rather an individual answer for each. Gamma is used to adjust the luminance values of the machine image to human vision. But again we don't know for sure if there is some magic being done that Epson doesn't tell us about.

My guess is that '1' in the box above would be no gamma adjustment. Hard to say for sure about the Epson setting as we don't know for sure what encoding is set behind the Epson curtain.

Epson scanner software no setting