Images suffering from poor luminance and contrast need enhancement before further processing or analysis. An algorithm based on local adaptive stretching window (LASW) technique is proposed. Since spatial contrast enhancement techniques by local manipulations show the pros and cons,the method combined with local and global manipulations is much more reasonable. Firstly,the high boost Laplacian unsharp mask (UM) operator is conducted for more hiding and edged information,then the LASW is operated on low contrast regions to develop details,and a locally adaptive filter is used to smooth the image further. At last,the global contrast adjustment is made after local manipulations. Experimental results show the good performance of the proposed algorithm with measure rules of enhancement by absolute mean brightness error and entropy,especially in the case of weak and low-contrast information in the image.