Sometimes a photo turns out to look rather flat, without any “pep”. There can be many reasons for that, flat lighting is one. But let’s concentrate on how to enhance such a photo.

The first consideration should be to increase the contrast.

Here is an example:

Every post-processing editor has a contrast slider.

Here, in the image above, you can see how the contrast slider has pepped up the photo.

Another thing to watch for is a limited range in the histogram. If you see some “unused” space at either end of the histogram data, move the histogram sliders to where the histogram data starts.

The example here shows that the histogram data does not reach all the way to the left end. That means the photo does not have any intense blacks. Moving the left (blacks) histogram slider to the right until it gets to where the graph shows some values can make the image significantly better.

Here is an example of a photo that has a limited range showing in the histogram. There is no data on almost half of the right end – the photo is significantly underexposed.

Now here is the same image with both histogram sliders moved to spread out the available data over the range of brightness levels.

See how even poor photos can be rescued and result in photos that you can show and share.

.:. © 2026 Ludwig Keck