In this paper, an effective color image retrieval algorithm is proposed based on the graph representation. Also we propose a color constancy algorithm to remove the effect of illumination change. Illumination condition of an image can be transformed to that of reference image using the proposed color constancy algorithm, so that the effect of dirrerent lighting is significantly alleviated. Then, we represent a color image as a graph with several nodes and edges in the histogram space, and finally two images are matched by compared two graphs representing them. The simulation results show that the proposed 3-step algorithm performs well for various conditions, including different lighting, translation, rotation, and scaling of the object in the image. In addition, the proposed algorithm is very fast compared to the geometry-based matching technique.