A new method based on complex networks is proposed for color–texture analysis. The proposal consists of modeling the image as a multilayer complex network where each color channel is a layer, and each pixel (in each color channel) is represented as a network vertex. The network dynamic evolution is accessed using a set of modeling parameters (radii and thresholds), and new characterization techniques are introduced to capt information regarding within and between color channel spatial interaction. An automatic and adaptive approach for threshold selection is also proposed. We conduct classification experiments on 5 well-known datasets: Vistex, Usptex, Outex13, CURet, and MBT. Results among various literature methods are compared, including deep convolutional neural networks. The proposed method presented the highest overall performance over the 5 datasets, with 97.7 of mean accuracy against 97.0 achieved by the ResNet convolutional neural network with 50 layers. © 2019