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.