Get creative with contrast

Apply distinctive looks to your photos by using four advanced techniques for boosting contrast

- James Abbott

Contrast is an important part of photography, whether that’s increasing it for impact, reducing it to create retro effects or using colour contrast for creative effect. It’s a simple yet powerful visual effect, and within the realms of photo editing, there are many ways that these different types of contrast can be controlled and even manipulated.

For our four techniques this month, we’re going to look at more advanced and creative ways of increasing contrast than simply creating an S-curve or increasing the black and white points using Levels. These will ultimately provide you with an idea of how different Adjustment Layers, blending modes and other settings can be used in combination for creative effect. Of course, the basic approaches to increasing contrast have their place and remain extremely useful, but we’re going to help you to think outside the box to create your own more unique effects.

1 Apply a targeted vignette