Honestly - it's a good one !
Kemal is happy, you're happy, I'm happy - everybody's happy.
.. me thinks .. ?
The most important part you say yourself:

...you just KNOW you have what you want.

About curves:
You keep playing with those settings. That's a way of learning the tool and what different manipulations do to the image at hand. Play around with it and see how the image responds, what parts of the curve corresponds to which image tones etc.

TomDart:
Learning photography the "hard" way was the only way before digital. Spending lots of hours in the darkroom was an excellent school, but I'll be the first to praise computer based image editing and refinements.
I can easily do 16 hours in the comfort of my normal living environment when deadline is round the corner and I wouldn't set foot again in a "lab" with smelly chemicals and dim, coloured light that makes you tired and weary.
Sure it's good to know what part of labwork an operation in PS ( or PSP ) correspond to from time to time, but trust me, there's nothing - besides developing film - you can do in a lab that you can't in PS ( or PSP ).

Bakkti.

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