Confused about contrast

gotham, to me the original looks best.

When viewing the photograph on your computer, what you see is limited by the display. Your photo could be very well composed and have great contrast, but if your display cannot produce the correct range in luminance (or colour reproduction) then you might not like the look. That's why calibrating plasma and LCD/LED TVs is important if you want an accurate picture. I recently started using a new UHD display panel for my computer, and I was blown away by how much better some old photos look as compared to the previous HD panel. It's like I upgraded from a $70 P[HTML_REMOVED]S to a full frame Nikon.

As for the camera, it's hard to have a perfect contrast because of the dynamic range limitation of your photographic device. You'll be in a tradeoff between blowing highlights and detail in dark shadows, and your adjustments will likely do the same. As KazYamamura demonstrated, increased contrast made details in shadows appear, but the bacon has lost a lot of detail. I'm often not happy at a camera's ability to capture the full dynamic range of a scene that a human eye can easily distinguish.

Adjusting dynamic range for your display can be done using a pluge pattern like this:

Once you get that set the absolute values of black (you need to determine what "black" means) and white for your device, then adjust for gamma and colour temperature, and finally colour saturation and hue adjustment.

Now play with LR sliders until you get what you like.