We want to brighten the dark areas a little and darken the light areas a little. At the same time, the yellow flowers have a couple of specular highlights that would probably blow out the detail if printed. The red leaves are a little too dark to make out the detail if printed, the result would be pretty dark and muddy.
Here is the original example image, loaded into GIMP. Experiment to see if it can work for your particular image. Occasionally this technique gives unacceptable color shifts in certain images.
If you feel your image has exposure problems you might want to consider those techniques as well. The contrast mask technique does some similar things for the exposure as the digital split ND filter and the blended exposures techniques. I adapted it for GIMP from a Photoshop tutorial on The Luminous Landscape web site (great photography web site BTW I recommend it). Giving credit where credit is due: I did not come up with this method. All the while your original image remains blissfully unchanged on its layer. The images are combined in overlay mode: dark parts with light, light parts with dark. The basic technique is to create a layer above the image that contains a B&W negative of the image.
You can of course modify your image directly in GIMP to decrease contrast, but the advantage of the contrast mask technique is that it allows you much more precise control, and gives better results. This may be necessary to obtain a decent print, because prints on paper do not have as much dynamic range as a monitor if you don’t control the contrast, detail in the highlights may blow out and detail in the shadows can block up and become muddy or even black. A contrast mask allows you to reduce overall contrast, simultaneously bringing out more detail in highlights and shadows. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to do create a contrast mask for your image in GIMP. Jeschke and may not be used without permission of the author. Text and images Copyright (C) 2002 Eric R.
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