1. In a method of processing a digital color photographic image by applying color reproduction functions formed by normalizing samples of color values from informational portions of the image to color values of the digital image, each of said samples of color values forming a distribution of color values having a characteristic shape, the improvement comprising the step of: correcting the shapes of the distributions of color values toward normal distributions having the same mean and standard deviation as the respective distributions of color values prior to forming the color reproduction functions.