Sometimes, when working with old photos, you'll find divergent tones from top to bottom, or side to side. Here's a quick, easy way to even those tones out a little! (This tutorial is written for Photoshop CS4, but can easily be adapted for earlier versions.) This particular sample photo, again provided by Twiz, is darker at the bottom of the photo, graduating to being quite light at the top. We need to find a happy compromise.
With your image open in Photoshop, add a Levels Adjustment layer. Look at the histogram. You can see that the left side of the histogram, the side that represents the dark values in the photograph, has a small area of nearly flat line before it starts spiking. You'll want to move your black point slider to the right, so it's more in line with the spiking.
Return to your Layers pallet. Select the Gradient Tool from the Tool Bar. Make sure your color selections are set to the default, Black and White. From the Gradient Selection menu, choose the Black to White option. 
Making sure the Levels Layer Mask is selected on the Layers menu, choose a spot on your photo at the point the darkest area begins to fade into a lighter tone. From that starting point, take the Gradient line all the way to the top of the photo.
Now the tones should appear a little more even.
You can also play around with Blending Modes, to see if it makes any difference to your photo. Use different modes and different opacities. Experiment!
You can also reverse the direction of the Black/White Gradient to lighten the darker areas, if you wish.
There you have a very quick, very easy method to even out tonal contrast in an image!
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