Developments in digital image processing have resulted in revolutionary applications in fields like medicine, military, security, biometrics, robotics, satellite image processing, digital image compression, digital image enhancement, digital video processing, etc. Image enhancement is a fundamental operation in image processing, creating an image, that is perceived by human visual system (HVS) in a pleasant way. The current project presents an image enhancement method, integrating the contrast enhancement and white balancing to form a unified algorithm. An optimized image enhancement algorithm has been derived, which yields good theoretical results based on two important histogram transform properties, namely contrast gain and non linearity. Experimental results show that proposed method achieves good performance and low complexity over traditional methods, and that it is successful in achieving better efficiency in terms of tone correction as well as white balancing.