Seismic waves propagating through viscoelastic media experience stratigraphic absorption and attenuation effects, which directly affect the imaging resolution in seismic exploration. Without stratigraphic absorption, the ratio of deep reflection energy to shallow reflection energy (attenuation ratio) is invariable at different frequencies. If a seismogram is decomposed into different frequency bands, these signals will show similar time–energy distributions. Therefore, the attenuation ratios should be similar across different frequency bands, except for frequency-variable weights. Nevertheless, the frequency-variable weights for different frequency bands can be obtained by benchmarking against the time–energy distributions of low-frequency information because the loss of low-frequency information is relatively insignificant. In this light, we obtained frequency-variable weights for different frequencies and established a stratal absorption compensation (SAC) model. The anisotropic basis of the shearlet enables nearly optimal representation of curved-shape seismic signals, and shearlets at different scales can represent signals for different frequency bands. Then, we combined the SAC model with the shearlet transform and established the new compensation method. As the signal and noise have different distributions in the shearlet domain, we selectively compensated the signals using a thresholding algorithm. Hence, it was possible to avoid noise enhancement. This is the prominent advantage of the proposed method over other compensation methods.