Selective Contrast and Selective Sharpening

As I discussed, the eye goes first to patterns it recognizes in light areas and then in dark ones. The eye also tracks from high to low contrast, in-focus to blur, high to low sharpness (which is different than in-focus to blur), and then, high to low saturation of color. In this next step, you are going to play with contrast and sharpness. But before we begin, let me first define these two terms.

Contrast is often confused with contrast ratio. Contrast is the difference in brightness between the light and dark areas of a picture. If there is a large difference between the light and dark areas, the result is an image with high contrast. Contrast ratio is the ratio of the lumens, as measured on a meter, ...

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