To solve the degradation of color images caused by low illumination condition, a novel algorithm to improve the visibility of low illumination images is proposed. At first, the operation based on logarithmic image processing (LIP) model is adopted to regulate the luminance component calculated from the color image in YUV color space so that the brightness and contrast of low level gray regions of the image can be increased accordingly. And then, the contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) with suitable parameters is introduced to modify the luminance component to improve the quality of image enhancement further. At last, a linear color restoration process based on the luminance gain is used to determine color values of the enhanced image. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is more effective and practicable, and the enhanced image can achieve an excellent global visual effect with clear details and natural colors, while avoiding excessive enhancement, noise enlargement and so on.