We propose a new postprocessing technique developed specifically for the reduction of color bleeding in DCT-coded color images. The proposed algorithm, based on a complete analysis of this particular kind of distortion, is used to identify and reduce color bleeding artifacts while attempting to preserve the sharpness of the reconstructed Images. Simulation results show that the method successfully reduces color bleeding in reconstructed images and improves the visual quality, both objectively and subjectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]