Method and apparatus for performing color transformations

A system that combines a reference color image with a color move tracer image creating a combined image capable of being edited as desired by the operator and one which records the actual color edits made on the reference image. The tracer is a color grid that represents the domain of colors in a specified color space encoding. The grid is converted into a color edit transform table and the color edits within the color space on a higher resolution version of the reference image, or on other images, can be performed using a table look-up operation. The invention can also be used to capture effects transforms that modify the input/output and/or screen display of an image without necessarily modifying the original image.