1. A method for compressing the dynamic range of a digital radiographic image comprising the steps of: providing an original digital radiographic image; processing said original digital radiographic image with an unsharp masking technique to produce a low frequency digital radiographic image having low frequency components; subtracting said low frequency digital radiographic image from said original digital radiographic image to produce a high frequency digital radiographic image; multiplying said low frequency image by a first gain factor and said high frequency image by a second gain factor to produce respective modified low and high frequency images; combining said modified low and high frequency images with a mid-range image to produce an output digital image; and passing said output digital image through a look-up table to render an image with code values that represent optical density of a printed or displayed rendering of the image.