In this paper we propose an efficient content-based image retrieval method using the color and wavelet based texture features. The color features are obtained from soft-color histograms of the global image and the wavelet-based texture features are obtained from the invariant moments of the high-pass sub-band through the spatial-frequency analysis of the wavelet transform. The proposed system, called a color and texture based two-step retrieval(CTBTR), is composed of two-step query operations for an efficient image retrieval. In the first-step matching operation, the color histogram features are used to filter out the dissimilar images quickly from a large image database. The second-step matching operation applies the wavelet based texture features to the retained set of images to retrieve all relevant images successfully. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm yields more improved retrieval accuracy with computationally efficiency than the previous methods.