Free PS Elements: Increasing contrast in Elements

1. Load the photo
Increasing the contrast for midtones is obviously appropriate when dealing with photos containing a lot of them. However, you may want to use this method even when you have a picture with a large deal of highlights or shadows but don’t want much of the picture to burn out or drop black.

2. The traditional way
Let’s see an example.

If you take the well-known path, click Enhance/Adjust Lighting/Brightness/Contrast. Drag the Contrast slider to the right to increase contrast in the same measure in all the lightness intervals of the photo. The effect is very rough, almost drawing-like when using larger values. Dark shadows tend to drop black and highlights to get bleached when you increase contrast strongly. You should only use this method when your blacks or whites are rather greyish, or if you want powerful contrast.

3. Doin’ it finely
On the other hand, if you want to preserve the proportion of shadows to highlights and aim to increase contrast only finely, forget about Brightness/Contrast. Your friend is Enhance/Adjust Lighting/Shadows/Highlights. You can find it directly above Brightness/Contrast, and its primary purpose is to adjust the shadowed and highlighted areas, although it also contains a slider for midtones.

First, set Lighten Shadows and Darken Highlights to 0%. You don’t need them now. Focus on Midtone Contrast instead. We used a value of +40 for the sample picture, just like in the previous step, and the result is much finer. The darkest and lightest areas didn’t change, only the midtones became more prominent.

4. A midfielder
The effect can be used not only to increase contrast but to make any photo more emphatic. Take care, however, because extreme values can make the image dull or the tones fall apart.