A previous study proposed a method for simulation of detail visibility of natural images (from different observation distances) by using contrast sensitivity functions and wavelets (Pedersen and Farup, Color and Imaging Conference 2012). In this paper we propose an improved method using the non-subsampled contourlet transform, which accounts for important aspects of the human visual system such as orientation sensitivity. In addition we account for the effect of surround illumination. Objective and subjective evaluations show that the proposed methodology is promising, and that it introduces fewer artifacts than the previous method.