An improved color image enhancement algorithm based on MSR was proposed in this paper. The appropriate wavelet bases were selected to decompose the input image into three levels. Then different enhancement algorithms were employed to process the decomposed wavelet coefficients and scale coefficients. For the wavelet coefficients, after the analyzing of each level??s characters, a modified adaptive non-sharp mask method was used. For the scale coefficients, the MSR algorithm was used, which improved the image contrast, and make the processed image more clear and colored. The experiments show the proposed algorithm enhanced some outdoors images obviously.