Underwater images suffer from low contrast, color shift, and color distortion, as selective attenuation occurs when light passes through the water and is scattered by small particles. Our proposed system enhances underwater images by employing adaptive color balance and contrast optimization techniques to address low contrast and color shifts. It starts with a dual-part adaptive color correction, followed by an enhanced contrast algorithm that uses the dark channel prior method for transmittance calculation, optimizing contrast while preserving essential information. A fusion technique then merges the gamma-corrected and sharpened images. Additionally, histogram stretching is used for visual improvement. The effectiveness of our system is thoroughly tested using both qualitative and quantitative metrics, including PCQI (Pixel-based Color and Quality Index), UCIQE (Underwater Color Image Quality Evaluation), IE (Image Entropy), and SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) algorithm, demonstrating superior performance over existing methods in enhancing underwater image.