Abstract: An automated method of improving digital color images at high speed, which supports pipe-lining and has very little memory requirements, and is therefore specially suitable for on-the-fly processing of real time video, as well as for processing of large batches of images without the need of human intervention. The method includes a novel dynamic range adaptation scheme that operates on the norm of the image, which is suitable as is for gray-scale images. For, color images, a simple color reconstruction stage is added that maintains optimal color fidelity.