Visual characteristics have been successfully applied to the study of realistic image rendition, which may provide higher quality images for human observation and machine vision. At first, the latest main researches on visual characteristics are briefly summarized, including visual spatial opponent, spectral opponent, visual adaptation, and visual cortex primary processing and so on. The development of realistic image rendition techniques based on visual characteristics is summarized in this paper. Since various algorithms have different emphases, the Retinex family methods primarily focusing on keeping color constancy and some other methods aiming at getting high dynamic range compression are analyzed in detail. Our study on this field is also mentioned and compared with some excellent algorithms according to theory structure and experiment results. Related representative software and hardware realization techniques are introduced, and our next research direction and the prospect on this field are given.