This paper describes the development of a system for evaluating the quality of coffee focused on the pre-processing of digital images using an algorithm based on the retinex theory called multi-scale retinex with color restoration (MSRCR). A dataset of images of coffee beans are collected and others techniques for image enhancement are compared, then a color gray-level coocurrence matrix (CGLCM) technique is used for features extraction and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to evaluate results with a set of prepared data, these results shows a good visual quality and better accuracy in classification for MSRCR techniques compared with others, finally conclusions and future works are presented.