It has been observed that magnification of a digital image results in a decrease in perceived contrast in various imaging applications. This study is aimed to quantify the loss in our contrast perception under varied sizes of field of view first and a local contrast enhancement method is proposed to compensate for the loss by pre-emphasizing selective image frequency components. The pre-emphasis gains are determined adaptively to the size of field of view and can also be adjusted by parameters in order to accentuate the overall amount of enhancement. In consequence, improved local contrast and clarity in magnified images could be achieved and undesirable halo and random noise boost-up artifacts typically shown in conventional methods could be attenuated.