Contrast

[marcgalera]

what's the best way to increase contrast within a photo to make the colors "pop" either in photoshop or a filter.

 

[Garbz]

Depends entirely on the photo. Also depends on how you define contrast. Are you talking about local contrast, or general contrast? Just turn up the contrast slider for the latter. For the former there's a good trick of duplicating the layer, blurring it with a wide radius say 300px or something that makes the image unrecognisable. Then de-saturating the layer, setting the blending mode to overlay and reducing the transparency to about 20%.