How to: Add Contrast and Saturation in PhotoFiltre

PhotoFiltre is a favourite program of mine. I have and use Picasa as my organizing software, PhotoFiltre as my "quick and dirty" editor, Adobe Lightroom, Elements and Photoshop CS2 as my high-end (read more complex) editors. If you are using PhotoFiltre, you can quite easily increase the contrast and saturation of your photos with minimal stress.

The Auto Gamma button will adjust both the brightness and contrast of your photo to what the program thinks should be correct. (I never use it!)

The Auto Contrast will adjust the contrast in the photo to a standard that the program thinks is correct for your photo. I generally try it. If it doesn't do what I want then I Undo it and go to the manual adjustments.

Manually adjusting the contrast is as simple as clicking on the Contrast + button once or twice. Be careful to not overdo it - you'll drive the shadows into complete blackness and the highlights (bright areas) into being "blown out".

Here is the Pyramid photo again with the contrast "way" overdone.


The colour saturation controls are used in the same way. Just click on the Saturation + button once or twice to boost the hue content of the photo. Again, don't overdo it or this time your photo will look like it's been hit with a dose of radiation and will glow in the dark!

Add a little contrast and Saturation

I find that my camera takes photos that are a little soft on contrast and sometimes undersaturated.

First, what do the words mean? A high contrast scene has very few middle or "gray" tones. A low contrast scene has an overall dull feeling - created by "gray" and dark tones. Most scenes have a normal contrast - some pure white, bright areas, some pure black dark areas and the rest of the image falls in the middle.

Saturation refers to the dominance of hue in the colour. The purer and brighter the colour, the more saturated it is or appears.

Looking at the original photograph taken at Giza, Egypt on a sunny morning in March, you can see that with the exception of the blue sky in the top left corner, the colours all look gray-ish and the colours are not particularly pure and bright.

Increasing the contrast in the photo will cause the "whites to be whiter and the blacks to be blacker" and thus do away with some of that gray feeling that the original imparts. It brings back the feeling of sunlight to the photo. Just be sure to not overdo the contrast increase - generally 10% is lots!

Remember too though that photographs are viewed subjectively - if you like it then it's fine. But...if you overdo your "corrections" to a photo, you may be the only one who likes it!

The overall feeling in the Sahara is that of yellow- orange rock and sand.
Although the contrast correction has brought the photo pretty much up to what the scene actually looked like, adding 5-10% of saturation to the overall image has caused the blues and overall reddish feeling of the pyramid and the sand to "pop".

All the corrections here were made with PhotoFiltre - a free photo editing program.