This paper presents an improved method for imaging in turbid water by using the individual strengths of the quadrature lock-in discrimination (QLD) method and the retinex method. At first, the high-speed QLD is performed on images, aiming at capturing the ballistic photons. Then, we perform the retinex image enhancement on the QLD-processed images to enhance the contrast of the image. Next, the effect of uneven illumination is suppressed by using the bilateral gamma function for adaptive illumination correction. The experimental results depict that the proposed approach achieves better enhancement than the existing approaches, even in a high-turbidity environment.