A method and apparatus remove color noise of an image signal in which a distortion of a YCbCr color space caused by noise is corrected using correlations between color channels in the YCbCr color space of low frequency (LF) and high frequency (HF) components of an image signal while maintaining the HF component. The apparatus includes: a separator separating the image signal including a luminance signal and a chrominance signal into an LF component and an HF component; an LF noise remover removing noise of the LF component from the image signal; an HF noise remover applying a linear variation rate of the chrominance signal with regard to the luminance signal of the noiseless LF component to the HF component separated from the image signal and generating a new HF component; and a combiner combining the noiseless LF component and the new HF component.