To improve the rendering effect of artistic images, a method enhancing features of artistic images is proposed based on histogram equalization and bilateral filtering in the article. Firstly, artistic images are divided into both high and low-frequency representations, and the multi-step enhancement processing level is delimited by multi-band decomposition. Secondly, the noise in the image is removed by bilateral filtering. Then, the grey-level histogram of the image is modified by using the histogram equalization. Finally, the features of the artistic image are enhanced by global tone mapping after histogram equalization processing is conducted. Then, the image is sharpened to improve the enhancement effect further. The experiments show that the features of the color and edge details turn out to be more vivid and clearer after the proposed method is implemented. The structural similarity (SSIM) measure of the image increases to 0.973, and the average gradient gets close to 0.8, which shows that the proposed method is effective.