Various methods have been proposed for enhancing the images. Some of those perform well in some specific application areas but most of the techniques suffer from artifacts due to over enhancement. To overcome this problem, we have introduced a new image enhancement technique namely Bilateral Histogram Equalization with Pre-processing (BHEP) which uses Harmonic mean to divide the histogram of the image. We have performed both qualitative and quantitative measurements for experiments and the results show that BHEP creates less artifacts in several standard images than the existing state-of-the-art image enhancement techniques.