When evaluating image contrast, the present work found that total impression formed from global and local appearances played an important role. Vividness, clearness and colorfulness were addressed by observers on account of the global appearance generated from an entire image. For the local appearance created from particular areas in an image, four factors were considered: reproduction of detail, distinguishability of objects, either or both lightness- and colorfulness-difference, and colorfulness of objects. To determine changes in perceived contrast arising from variations in the local and global appearances, pixel-based color differences at different image resolutions were selected as image contrast correlate. It was demonstrated that this approach was reasonable in the prediction of perceived contrast changes for images rendered in lightness, chroma or sharpness domain.