Patent ID: 7978233

Claim:
An image processing apparatus, comprising: an input section which acquires image data and information about subject condition at a time of photographing said image data; a smoothing processing section which obtains a smoothing image from said image data; an adjusting section which determines a brightness enhancement amount of dark area gradation of said image data, depending on said subject condition; and a correcting section which corrects said dark area gradation of said image data according to said brightness enhancement amount determined by said adjusting section, wherein said adjusting section: divides an image of said image data into a plurality of subregions and determines said brightness enhancement amount for each of said subregions, and executes one of a group of processes composed of an averaging process, a weighted averaging process, a maximal value calculating process, and a mode value and intermediate value calculating process of said brightness enhancement amount for each of said subregions, to determine a representative value of said brightness enhancement amount; and said correcting section corrects said dark area gradation of said image data according to a gain map obtained by using said smoothing image and said representative value of said brightness enhancement amount.