A new method for color texture retrieval using color and edge features is proposed in this study. The proposed method unifies color and edge features rather than simply analyzing only color characteristics. First, the distributions of color and local edge patterns are used to derive a similarity measure for a pair of textures. Then, a retrieval method based on the similarity measure is proposed to retrieve texture images from a database of color textures. Finally, the similarity measure is extended to retrieve texture regions from a database of natural images. Since the proposed feature distributions can resist variations in translation, rotation and scale, our method has the ability to retrieve texture images or regions that change in translation, rotation and/or scale. The effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method have been demonstrated by various experiments.