Overview

This topic outlines the options available to control the automatic enhancement of image contrast.

Contrast enhancement

In Color Factory Settings, expand the relevant channel and select Color & Contrast. 

The following dialog appears.

If you select Enable SmartContrast™, Color Factory will automatically try to choose the best color enhancement out of the available algorithms. Keep in mind that if your system has the optional SmartColor™ module, it makes the Color and Contrast adjustment feature redundant and you should NOT enable it 

If you select Enable Auto Levels enhancement, Color Factory will optimize image levels. The clipping values refer to the number of pixels that will be clipped outside the black and white end points. E.g. if the black clipping value has been set to 0,5%, half a percent of the pixels in the image will be black.

By also selecting Use same adjustment on all colors the adjustment is done on the luminance component only, retaining the saturation and hue. The result is that the color cast isn’t removed, which may or may not be an advantage.

To avoid taking any potential colored border into account when performing color and contrast adjustment (this could have an undesired effect on the Auto Levels adjustment), you can choose to ignore a percentage of the image border by entering a percentage in the Percent of image border to ignore field.

If you select Enable Adaptive Histogram Equalization enhancement, the image contrast is altered to achieve an evenly distributed histogram. You can select how many units you wish to split the image into before applying the contrast adjustment by selecting a value from the Number of areas drop-down list. Select 1 area to have the entire image adjusted as one. By choosing more areas, different areas of the image may be processed differently when adjusting contrast. The amount of contrast enhancement determines to which extent Color Factory will attempt to fully equalize the image histogram.