This paper proposes a contrast enhancement technique which stretches the intensity surfaces of image to improve the quality of the digital photos. The proposed method enhances the contrast of image by stretching the intensity surface of the original image to the maximum range of the output image in proportion to the distances between the original intensity surface and upper, lower intensity surface, respectively. The upper and lower intensity surfaces are generated from the original intensity surface by gaussian smoothing. In the experiments, digital color images in a variety of illumination conditions were used and the proposed method was compared with other several existed image enhancement algorithms, which are histogram stretching, surface stretching, histogram equalization, gamma correction and retinex. It was proved that the experimental results were more natural visually without deterioration of gradation.