The key to automatic white balancing of digital imagery is to estimate accurately the color of the overall scene illumination. Many methods for estimating the illumination's color have been proposed [1-6]. Although not the most accurate, one of the simplest and quite widely used methods is the gray world algorithm [6]. Borrowing on some of the strengths and simplicity of the gray world algorithm, we introduce a modification of it that significantly improves on its performance while adding little to its complexity.