Abstract: The Balinese papyrus is one of the media to write the ideas from minstrels in ancient times. Currently, many of ancient literature that written in papyrus very difficult to identify because the writings were beginning to rot or fade influenced by age. This study takes the Balinese papyrus characters as its object. The improvement of the image quality in image processing of the characters here refers to the change for the quality of the image before its next development. There is the process of identifying the color space to spot the shape of the papyrus characters. The difference of the colors is so small so that it needs CIELab to process the identification out of its background and noise.