Patent ID: 8498332

Claim:
An apparatus for modifying the color of an image region based on a luminance of the region, comprising: an image signal carrier, the image signal carrier being encoded with an image signal including luminance information and chrominance information of an image, the chrominance information including chrominance values; a luminance information evaluator to evaluate a luminance for a region within the image to identify when the luminance is less than a lower threshold value and identifies when the luminance is greater than a higher threshold value; and a chrominance information modifier to modify the chrominance information corresponding to the given region by multiplying the chrominance information by an overall suppression ratio, the overall suppression ratio based on a suppression ratio and a suppression weight, the suppression ratio selected based on luminance information in the image signal, and the suppression weight selected based only on the maximum of the chrominance values in the region, wherein a suppression of chrominance information resulting from the modification is lower when the luminance is between the lower threshold and the upper threshold relative to the suppression of chrominance information when the luminance is lower than the lower threshold value or higher than the higher threshold value.