An apparatus includes: an image pickup unit capturing a color image observed by the microscope; a camera characteristic information storage unit storing camera characteristic information about a characteristic of the microscope color image pickup apparatus; a color correction parameter calculation unit calculating a color correction parameter for a color correcting process on the color image captured by the image pickup unit according to the color image captured by the image pickup unit and the camera characteristic information stored in the camera characteristic information storage unit; and a color correcting unit performing a color correcting process on the color image captured by the image pickup unit according to the color correction parameter calculated by the color correction parameter calculation unit.