DIGITAL COLOR IMAGE PROCESSING METHOD WITH SHAPE CORRECTION OF HISTOGRAMS USED TO PRODUCE COLOR REPRODUCTION FUNCTIONS

In a method for processing digital color images derived from photographic film, the method employing color reproduction functions generated by normalizing random samples of color values from different colors, sampling of color values from noisy areas of an image, or scanner noise can distort the randomness of sampling and result in unwanted contrast reductions and color shifts in the processed digital images. The problem is solved by correcting the shapes of the distributions of color value samples toward normal distributions having the same means and standard deviations as the sample distributions prior to forming the color reproduction functions.