The processing pipeline of a digital camera converts the RAW image acquired by the sensor to a representation of the original scene that should be as faithful as possible. There are mainly two modules responsible for the color-rendering accuracy of a digital cam- era: the former is the illuminant estimation and correction module, and the latter is the color matrix transformation aimed to adapt the color response of the sensor to a standard color space. These two modules together form what may be called the color correction pipeline. We design and test new color correction pipelines that exploit different illuminant estimation and correction algorithms that are tuned and automatically selected on the basis of the image content. Since the illuminant estimation is an ill-posed problem, illuminant correction is not error-free. An adaptive color matrix transformation module is optimized, taking into account the behavior of the first module in order to alleviate the amplification of color errors. The proposed pipe- lines are tested on a publicly available dataset of RAW images. Experimental results show that exploiting the cross-talks between the modules of the pipeline can lead to a higher color-rendition accu- racy. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publica- tion, including its DOI. (DOI: 10.1117/1.JEI.22.2.023014)