According to the color constancy theory, a modified variation Retinex is proposed for improving the visibility of the dark regions in images under insufficient and/or non-uniform lighting conditions. A new penalty functional based on nonlinear diffusion and correlation between the reflectance and the given image is designed for the intensity image enhancement, followed by adaptive color compensation. With high computational efficiency achieved by an improved multi-resolution algorithm, simulation results prove that the proposed method shows more colorful and vivid visual performance, and achieves wider dynamic range with higher objective standard values.