Color in an image is resolved to 3 or 4 color components and 2-Dimages of these components are stored in
separate channels. Most of the color image enhancement algorithms are applied channel-by-channel on
each image. But such a system of color image processing is not processing the original color. When a color
image is represented as a quaternion image, processing is done in original colors. This paper proposes an
implementation of the quaternion approach of enhancement algorithm for enhancing color images and is
referred as the modified alpha-rooting by the two-dimensional quaternion discrete Fourier transform (2-D
QDFT). Enhancement results of this proposed method are compared with the channel-by-channel image
enhancement by the 2-D DFT. Enhancements in color images are quantitatively measured by the color
enhancement measure estimation (CEME), which allows for selecting optimum parameters for processing
by thegenetic algorithm. Enhancement of color images by the quaternion based method allows for
obtaining images which are closer to the genuine representation of the real original color