Patent ID: 7580064

Claim:
An imagining apparatus comprising: a first converting circuit that receives image data of an image subjected to an automatic white balance correction and converts the image data according to one of a plurality of scene-reference color space formats; a temporary memory for storing the image data for which tone correction is to be performed in the one of the plurality of scene-reference color space formats; and a tone correction circuit, wherein the plurality of scene-reference color space formats comprise a first scene-reference color space format and a second scene-reference color space format having linear image data and an extended color space of the first scene-reference color space format, wherein a plurality of luminance values corresponding to a plurality of cumulative histogram values with equal intervals are extracted from the image data in a YscYCC format, wherein the image data is categorized into a plurality of categories according to a first extracted luminance value and a luminance range determined by a second extracted luminance value and a third extracted luminance value, wherein the category information is used for selecting tone correction parameters, and wherein the image data is read out from the temporary memory or a recording medium to perform the tone correction, and the image data resulting from the tone correction is recorded in the recording medium.