25

F-Spot had an "enhance" button that magically turns the image on the left into the image next to it (see below). It worked brilliantly for quite a range of images. Unfortunately it has problems, and I'm not using it for photo management any more.

Does anyone know of a similar excellent "enhance" function? The one in Shotwell is useless.

enter image description here

Burgi
  • 6,768
Jean Jordaan
  • 497

4 Answers4

28

If you are on the command line I recommend "convert", a command from the ImageMagick Package. Try:

$ convert -enhance -equalize -contrast image.jpg image_enhanced.jpg

And to loop a whole batch in Bash shell:

for file in *.jpg; do
 convert -enhance -equalize -contrast $file "${file%.jpg}_new.jpg"
done

snapshot_batch

Nissim Nanach
  • 650
Ielton
  • 4,701
25

Just for people that stumble over this thread and think, the results with enhance, equalize and/or contrast are ugly should definitely try this options:

convert -auto-gamma -auto-level -normalize original.jpg improved.jpg

And for the batch-lovers, having the originals in the orig-folder...:

for sp in orig/*; do 
  echo "Converting Image: $sp"
  convert -auto-gamma -auto-level -normalize $sp $(basename $sp)
done

I believe, the result is exactly what people want and need for their photos: White balance, gamma correction and overall light correction...

Have fun!

themole
  • 365
5

If you use the GIMP, the toolbar menu has an option for Colours->Auto->Equalize. I tried it on your "before" image and the "after" result was almost identical.

Also GIMP would give you more control over adjusting colour curves/contrast/etc. manually if you prefer.

yorx378219
  • 66
2

When trying to enhance the visibility of details in an image where some regions are low-contrast, I found none of the single-step solutions in ImageMagick or The GIMP satisfactory. (XV used to have a great button, but is non-free and hard to obtain now.)

But the following process produced the kind of results I wanted. It simulates a high/medium pass filter in The GIMP.

http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/equalize-homogenize-brightness

  1. Do Layer -> Duplicate Layer
  2. In the Layers Window (Ctrl-L) be sure the upper copy is selected
  3. Do Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur with a medium size radius (e.g. 25)
  4. Do Colors -> Invert
  5. Do Colors -> Desaturate -> (Lightness)
  6. In the Layers Window (Ctrl-L) set the Mode to "Overlay"
  7. If satisfied, do Image -> Flatten Image. Otherwise undo to step 2 and try again with a different blur radius.

You may see a visible "halo" around dark elements, or "shadow" around light elements - that is it working!

Better results might be obtained by combining a number of layers with different blur radii.

joeytwiddle
  • 1,795