Automatic Contrast Enhancement

Sometimes you have a photo that looks *ok* but you know it could look better. The photo below really needs some contrast changes. It needs to lighten up in areas and balance in others. To do this I'm going to use the Automatic Contrast Enhancement tool which can be found in the Effects menu. Effects>Enhance Photo>Automatic Contrast Enhancement.

As with most Paint Shop Pro tools, if you want to correct just an area of the photo and not the whole photo you can make a selection before choosing the Automatic Contrast Enhancement tool.

There are three main options to choose and these effect the overall light and intensity, and balance the highlights, mid-tones and shadows. You can do this manually with other tools in Paint Shop Pro. The Automatic Contrast Enhancement tool is a shortcut for quick image editing.

On the image above I chose Darker for the Bias, Mild for the Strength and Natural for the Appearance. It still doesn't look quite right.

Since I think the first adjustments were still too dark I changed the Bias to Neutral, the Strength to Normal and left the Appearance at Natural.

I like the results of the above image much better and these adjustments took just seconds.

As with the other Photo Enhancement tools in Paint Shop Pro you should not feel like you have to use them only on photos. Above is an underwater image. Although it definitely looks underwater, cloudy and foggy, I'd like to see it a little more clearly.

I've set the Bias to Darker, the Strength to Normal and the Appearance to Natural.

I now have a brighter image. Perhaps a little too bright. But that could be adjusted quickly if I so desired.

Copyright Vikki Olds, All Rights Reserved