In this paper, a new light-value approaching method to enhance a color image by excluding the effect of incident illumination is proposed. The method uses the fundamental vector transformation in which an estimated color of illumination is rotated to the white color of natural daylight. Then the transformed red, green, and blue values of each pixel are nonlinearly mapped into the 8-bit values to enhance intensity and saturation in the dark portion of the image. The proposed algorithm can produce the enhanced color image fast and efficiently without any space conversion or noticeable distortion.