Among image enhancement methods, histogram equalization (HE) has received the most attention because of its intuitive implementation quality, high efficiency, and the monotonicity of its intensity mapping function. However, HE is indiscriminate and overemphasizes the contrast around intensities with large pixel populations but little visual importance. To address this issue, we propose an HE-based method that adaptively controls the contrast gain according to the potential visual importance of intensities and pixels. Observing that in natural scenes image details are usually hidden in darker regions that have noticeable local differences, we formulate the potential visual importance on the basis of the multi-resolution, dark-pass filtered gradients in the image. Experiments show that our method is highly discriminating in terms of noises and trivial image gradients, and it guarantees great global contrast preservation.