I’m a sucker for good contrast in a photo. Since I mainly like to dabble in monochrome work, contrast for me is the gravy train – second only to composition. Regardless of whether you take black and white photographs or colour ones, take them of your cat or of war zones, I feel a little bit of contrast goes a long way to making a photo come alive. So, let’s investigate together just what contrast is, and how we can bring it out in our work.
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Very often, when we upload our pictures to the computer from the camera and first look at them on the screen, they will appear dull and lifeless like photo No.1 on the right.

In this instance the photo is under exposed, often a problem when auto flash is used with a long lens, the flash is too far away from the subject to give the proper exposure.

Here are some suggestions for altering the brightness and contrast of the image in Photoshop, use them in the order that they appear, only move on to the next method if you are not getting what you want.
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