This paper presents a new method for post-processing of coded images based upon the low-pass filtering followed by the projection onto the NQCS (narrow quantization constraint set). We also investigate how the proposed method works on JPEG-coded real images. The starting point of the QCS-based post-processing techniques is the centroid of the QCS, where the original image belongs. The low-pass filtering followed by the projection onto the QCS makes the images lie on the boundary of the QCS. It is likely that, however, the original image is inside the QCS. Hence projection onto the NQCS gives a lower MSE (mean square error) than does the projection onto the QCS. Simulation results show that setting the narrowing coefficients of the NQCS to be 0.2 yields the best performance in most cases. Even though the JPEG-coded image is low-pass filtered and projected onto the NQCS repeatedly, there is no guarantee that the resultant image has a lower MSE and goes closer to the original image. Thus only one iteration is sufficient for the post-processing of the coded images. This is interesting because the main drawback of the iterative post-processing techniques is the heavy computational burden. The single iteration method reduces the computational burden and gives us an easy way to implement the real time VLSI post-processor.