A fast rate-distortion analytical framework for the PSNR-based optimization of JPEG baseline compression on color images is proposed in this paper. The analysis is conducted in the luminancechrominance color space and based upon the -domain analysis method [1]. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can dramatically improve the performance of the JPEG baseline compression on color images in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Meanwhile, while the complexity of the proposed scheme is kept low, its results are very close to that from exhaustive searching method.