Altering contrast help

[BigLoada]

I am totally new to editing and I wanted to make my pictures a bit more punchy with a bit more contrast. After looking at some tutorials on line, I found about a million different ways of doing this and I am more confused tha ever now.

I tried using just the Curves settings and it worked okay but I was wondering if this was a decent enough method or do I need to be doing something more complex. I found makimg a contrast layer and desaturating then inverting it and chamnging opacity was good for some shots but it all seemed a bit long winded.

Just wondering what people generally do for contrast.

 

[Chappers]

Most of my work is done in Lightroom, but if you have Photoshop CS3 or later you can use the ACR ( Adobe Camera Raw )processor to make life easier.

Go to the curves tab in ACR and and simply adjust the "Darks " slider to make them darker and then use the "lights " slider to make them lighter. It's the same as curves but a lot easier. You can also adjust the range at which each slider operates.

Although ACR is designed to work with RAW files, you can get it to work with JPEGs . Simply go to the preferences option, and under the file handling tab select and tick "Prefer Adobe Camera Raw for JPEGs".

 

[subseasniper]

Adding a curves adjustment layer is a good start, its normally what I do. I drag the highlight and shadow arrows into the first 'bumps' in the histogram. I then set an anchor point in the middle of the curve line. I then add anchor points for the shadow and highlight areas (one for each) and make a slight 's' curve.

This seems to lift the contrast and colours nicely, if you toggle the layer on and off its like a sheet of gauze has been lifted from your photograph.