gamma is a floating point value, neutral value is 1.0, if the value is larger than 1.0 then the image gets brighter.
shadow defines the minimum input value that is necessary to create an output value larger than zero. shadow has to be in the range [0..maxin]. Its default value is 0.
highlight defines the maximum input value that produces an output value smaller than maxout. highlight has to be in the range [0..maxin], highlight has to be larger than shadow. Its default value is the same as maxin (16383 if not set).
maxin defines the size of the gamma table. The size depends on the scanner/backend. If the scanner uses 8 bits gamma input then maxin has to be set to 255, for 10 bits 1023, for 12 bits 4095, for 14 bits 16383. The default is 16383. To find out what value maxin has to be call scanimage with a very large gamma table [0]0-[99999]255 then scanimage prints an error message with the needed size of the gamma table.
maxout defines the maximum output value. Take a look at the output of scanimage -h to find out what maxout has to be. The default value is 255.