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5 Techniques for Enhancing Contrast in Digital Photos

digital-photography-school.com — Extensive advice for increasing contrast in photos. Very good tips and tricks.

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  • iStunT, on 10/11/2007, -13/+5there wasent THAT much of a difference... OR you can also just slide the contrast button up a bit, works same.
    • whatsgoodike, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5I personally think the Levels Editor does most of this much easier..
      Don't make your darkest grays black, and your lightest grays white, and your safe.
    • EVogel, on 10/11/2007, -8/+5Curves and masks??

      sounds like my mom on the weekends...
    • gamalkik, on 10/11/2007, -2/+10you know nothing about digital darkroom if you think that 'Contrast' will do the same....
    • r1ptide64, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2I couldn't even tell which one was before and which was after without reading it. Then again, I'm not an artist.
    • JAKN, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1@ whatsgoodike
      even better, hold own ALT (option?) while adjusting the either the darks or brights slider in the Levels Layer, and it will show you what pixels are being clipped.
  • gafasiesornivek, on 10/11/2007, -10/+1Steve Jobs has very good tips and tricks.
  • idevlabsdotcom, on 10/11/2007, -2/+20Instructions copy/pasted from article:

    1. Curves and Masks
    ???
    3. Here are before and after images that look exactly the same!!

    Enjoy.
    • spudnic, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7@idevlabsdotcom (#6705599)
      To be honest he did a good job with the images he used, but he picked really, really bad images to use as examples
      It's a subtle difference, but try putting them one on top of another in Photoshop then slide the opacity of the top one back and forth, you'll see it
  • DeskFlyer, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/levels.htm
  • kaffein, on 10/11/2007, -4/+5blah
  • regeya, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7Something I'll add to the Unsharp Mask trick: Try bringing the whitepoint and blackpoint away from absolute black and white first. Yeah, you may run into quantization errors even worse, but sometimes you'll want more contrast than you can get without blowing highlights and shadows, and you may or may not want to mess with masks, depending on how tight your deadline is.

    I've been known to flatten, bring up Levels, bump the blackpoint up to 32(!) and the whitepoint down to 234(!) then bump up the Amount on Unsharp Mask to as much as 45 percent(!!) and the Radius up to 50px(!!!) Since I work in newsprint it's not that critical to maintain pristine images, but YMMV.
    • OBKenobi, on 10/11/2007, -0/+145 percent? I'm shocked.
    • Tempest811, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1regeya, you are truly groundbreaking. Your avant-garde approach to image manipulation is a testament to the amazing human capacity. Clearly those exclamation points and ridiculously high pixel radii show that you are on the cutting edge.
  • pillfred, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5I had good luck with a purple filter on a pic that was a bit to bright. This stuff is cool but kind of bums a guy out in a way. Oh well you still need to get the good shot in the first place.
  • hagbard72, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4Can't tell the difference.
  • dagamer34, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7I'm still waiting for the Photoshop feature that turns crap into gold, that way I can give it to people who take horrible pictures on Facebook. Hell, even when they made red-eye reduction into 1 button, people still don't learn.
  • L0g1X, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2People making photo editing too complicated. There are many ways to increase contrast, and each may give slightly different results, but most of the time, just using the Brightness/Contrast in Photoshop CS3 tool is good enough. Try using all those different methods on one photo and compare. Barely any difference (except using the dodge/burn method).

    The best way to increase contrast is just to use a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer. Then, paint in the layer mask. Use several adjustment layers with different contrast settings if you want to be precise.

    Why do people like to make complicated and useless techniques for simple touch-ups? I don't know; maybe they're trying to be pro.
  • dognose, on 10/11/2007, -3/+3I just use http://lunapic.com/ and their color adjustment / contrast editor.
  • bodutola, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0true
  • GeneralKickass, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1Holy *****. The subtle difference is hard to catch with the naked eye.
  • Waredgo, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5I think that it's a very good article.
    Sure, there are a lot of photoshop tutorial sites out there. but I think that this is a good example of a good, straight-to-the-point one that just uses basic techniques, not overly-complicated ones.
    • r1ptide64, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2At least the over-complicated tutorials have results you can actually see.
  • Penta5, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0If you can't see the diffrences in contrast, you need a better monitor.
  • GregHeist, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0A very useful article...I found it pretty enlightening.

    Greg
    http://thru-the-lens-gregh.blogspot.com/
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