brightness and contrast

Hi Ernie,

a) if your image is vector only:
- you can change the colors directly and individually
- or use a filter (Filters -> Color) - you should probably group everything before you use this, for easy removal of the filter.
- or use an extension (which will really permanently change the colors of every object, but seems to not include a contrast enhancing option) (Extensions -> Color -> User defined / More/Less Lightness / Adjust HSL ).

b) if your image is a raster image:
- use a filter, see above.
- use an extension (Extension -> Raster) - this will really change the image data.

Filters will not alter the data of the original image, so you can easily remove or edit them anytime.

Regards,
 Maren

I am an old man editing my dead brother's writings. Some of the text is very faint and I wish to improve it by altering the brightness or the contrast or both. As simple as that

Hi Ernie,

so I would guess that you are probably working with raster images (scans, or photos).

For this type of image, Inkscape is not the most suitable tool, as it is a vector editing software, which is mainly intended to modify curves (called paths). Inkscape drawings consist of mathematically defined objects, not of colored dots, as raster images, like your brother's writings, do.
Inkscape has *some* functionality for this, via the aforementioned filters, but it's not its main 'area of expertise'.

You will be better off using a raster image editing software for this, I think - like some photo editing program. They are made for this kind of task. Take a look at The Gimp (http://gimp.org), to find a free and open source alternative to Photoshop and the likes.

Kind regards,
 Maren