Thanks for the replies, everyone!
@BoltBait thanks for reminding me that tool existed, I guess I was thinking so much about curves and levels that I forgot about the basics.
@MJW, do you have a magical box from where you take out a plugin for every need I have? Sadly, the scanned documents I wanted to enhance seemed to have some very dark pixels scattered around, so the changes it made were near to none. I ended up going with @ardneh's tip. Using the levels tool wasn't so difficult after someone told me what slider to use (thanks dude), and once I realized I could use the histogram to figure out where to stop. Definetively using your plugin for other projects tought, having a task automated is always great!