Image fusion techniques are widely used to integrate a lower spatial resolution multispectral image with a higher spatial resolution panchromatic image. However, the existing techniques either cannot avoid distorting the image spectral properties or involve complicated and time-consuming decomposition and reconstruction processing in the case of wavelet transform-based fusion. In this study a simple spectral preserve fusion technique: the Smoothing Filter-based Replacement(SFR) is proposed based on a simplified solar radiation and land surface reflection model. By using a ratio between a higher resolution image and its low pass filtered (with a smoothing filter) image, spatial details can be injected to a co-registered lower resolution multispectral image minimizing its spectral properties and contrast. The technique can be applied to improve spatial resolution for either colour composites or individual bands. The fidelity to spectral property and the spatial quality of SFM are convincingly demonstrated by an image fusion experiment using IKONOS panchromatic and multispectral images. The visual evaluation and statistical analysis compared with other image fusion techniques confirmed that SFR is a better fusion technique for preserving spectral information.