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For any given image, adjusting its levels to increase contrast as in images below, a lot of internal details get darkened and are not noticeable, like the texture of the tree on right, etc.
However level adjusting to increase highlights and brightness those details are visible again as in the original image. Is there a way to prevent this from happening, any specific technique or tool for this purpose?
I'll interpret your question in the opposite way everyone else has. You seem to me to be asking how to prevent the details becoming visible again. Once you have darkened your image, increase the black point. This will make the new shadows actually black, and prevent the details from being recovered.
You can do this in levels in most editors, or with curves:
The details that were preserved in the lower part of the curve will now be black and not recoverable:
A well know technique is called "luminosity masks". You create a selection mask where the pixels selection level is:
This done by:
For instance you can make a selection focused on the mid-tones, so you selection mask looks like this:
Or with your image like this (white indicates lack of selection)
And you can then play with the mid-tone contrast without harming shadows and highlights:
The same technique can be applied to select the darks and then lower them without turning all the shadows into charcoal:
If there were an easy solution to this, Camera manufacturers would have built it in-camera (and cashed out) long ago :)
Here's the problem.
The best modern cameras are sensitive to at most ~15 stops of dynamic range, whereas estimates have put the dynamic range of the human eye at around 20 stops (see this post, for example). In short, your camera can't see as well as you; and when you encounter high-contrast scenes like this, it's up to you to determine how to realize your creative vision while compensating for those limits.
Some approaches you may be interested in:
Of course, there are many more approaches — experiment, and see what works for you!
To put it another way — when you up the contrast, your editor is doing exactly what you tell it to: making the shadows darker, and highlights lighter.
If the difference between your shadows and highlights is too great... you can always flatten out your tone curve, which is what HDR does. Here's the histogram from a RAW file I shot at sunset in Brooklyn showing significant clipping in both the shadows and the highlights:
And here's the histogram after exposure blending my bracketed shots:
Still needs work; but you've got all the dynamic range there to work with. Note that this can make your shot look super unnatural if you're not judicious with it.
Hope this helps!
If I understand your question correctly, you are looking for more control over the lightness and darkness over specific parts of an image - more than what the Levels tool gives you.
If so, then with Photoshop you have lots of options. I'll cover a few going from "blunt instrument" approach through to "potentially hours of work". Most general purpose image editors offer these tools, but perhaps in different places - maybe with different names.
Image > Adjustments > Shadows/Highlights - This tool tries to selectively lift dark areas of the image without touching items that are without detail. Note this doesn't help much when you have an image where the blacks are already featureless. It also has a highlight controls.
Contrast isn't just light and dark! With an image with different colors, you can use Vibrance and Hue/Saturation or other tools to enhance the color contrast between different objects (don't go too crazy).
History Brush Tool (On Toolbar) - After you have made a change, you can use this brush to take selected parts of the image back to its original state. Takes a little bit of getting used to, but a reasonably quick way to selectively revert parts of an image.
Image > Adjustments > Curves - This tool is like levels, but gives you the ability to create your own control points so you can have finer control over the image's contrast curve. Of course, more control means more complexity and time, but if you need it, it can be valuable. I would recommend using this tool as an adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves) so you can keep making changes after saving the file. And just as with Levels, you can adjust each color separately.
Adjustment Layer + Mask - After creating an adjustment layer, you can create a mask to limit the effect of the adjustment. The masks are greyscale (although normally displayed as shades of magenta) with the darker the shade the more the mask stops the affect of the adjustment layer. Here you can paint in the areas you don't want to change with your adjustment. Editing a layer mask takes getting used to, but does offer a huge amount of control. You can, of course, have multiple adjustment layers. As your changes are on an adjustment layer, you can always go back and tweak (as long as you have saved the image as a Photoshop document with layers intact).
Note - all of these techniques work best when you start with enough detail in the dark and light areas. If you don't, you can end up with banding or weird blocks of featureless shadow in the midst of a normally toned scene. So starting out with a good image is half the battle. If you find yourself tweaking images a lot, you also may want to consider shooting RAW. The extra bit depth should give you more room for adjustments before you start seeing artifacts.
Final note - these are not the only tools and techniques available! I certainly recommend googling the tool names to check out both Adobe's documentation as well as any tutorials out there. This entry assumes Photoshop CC 2020, some tools may not be available in earlier versions.
After some clarification on existing answers, if the intention is to increase contrast, then leave the small sub-highlights in those areas [sparkles, for want of a better word] less visible, then you could try brushing over with the burn tool
This is very rough & I've only done the tree & bottom right corner.
First, I punched up the contrast [unattractively high].
Then, burn tool at 100%, set to highlights.
Sparkles gone.
