In this paper, a model of two-wave mixing in the photorefractive crystal, which takes account of the difference in spatial frequency in a beam, has been built to study the image enhancement effect in coherent optical amplification. Based on the theoretical analysis of the model, the gain distribution for each pixel in the signal beam has been obtained. It shows that the unevenness of the gain is induced by the difference in spatial frequency in the beam. The factors that impact on the uniformity of image enhancement have been analyzed. As an example, the effects of these factors in a given photorefractive crystal have been studied through simulation.