A peaking circuit for use in a digital video signal processing system includes a digital peak detector which produces a peak magnitude whenever the slope of the video signal changes polarity. The peak magnitudes, and the absences of peaks are summed in an accumulator over a field period. The accumulated peaks are applied to a gain calculating circuit which develops a peaking control signal having three regimes. For low valued accumulated peaks the gain or peaking control signal is constant and relatively large. For high valued accumulated peaks the gain is constant and negative. In between the gain is in inverse porportion to the value of the accumulated peaks.