A steganographic method using three directional data embedding for gray images is presented in this paper. Cover image is divided into non-overlapping $2 imes2$ sub-blocks and the basis pixel is selected to calculate the three different values of each sub-block. Difference values are replaced by embedding the number of secret bits that is referenced by the range table. For the three pixel pairs in the sub-block, the optimal pixel adjustment is preceded to reduce the distortion of visual quality. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a good visual quality and high capacity.