Techniques of adjusting the salience of an image include generating values of photographic development parameters for a foreground and background of an image to adjust the salience of the image in the foreground. These parameters are global in nature over the image rather than local. Moreover, the optimization of the salience over such sets of global parameters is provided through two sets of these parameters by an encoder: one set corresponding to the foreground, in which the salience is to be either increased or decreased, and the other set corresponding to the background. Once the set of development parameters corresponding to the foreground region and the set of development parameters corresponding to the background region have been determined, a decoder generates an adjusted image with an increased salience based on these sets of development parameters.