Low-light images usually contain high noise and low contrast. This brings bad visual feelings and hinders subsequent computer vision work. At present, many algorithms have been proposed to enhance low-light images. However, the existing methods still have some problems, such as insufficient enhancement, color distortion, or overexposure. In this paper, we propose a low-light image enhancement network based on the spatial pyramid to solve the problems existing in other methods, so as to make the enhancement result closer to the normal illumination image in brightness and color. The network is divided into two parts. Firstly, the decomposition network is designed based on Retinex theory, and the image is decomposed into the illumination image and reflection image. Then, the illumination image is processed through the three convolution kernels on the spatial pyramid module to obtain three sets of features with different scales. Next, we concatenate these three groups of features together. And the concatenated features are extracted through a convolution kernel to obtain the enhanced illumination image. Finally, the enhanced illumination image and the decomposed reflection image are multiplied pixel by pixel to obtain an enhanced image. In addition, we introduce a color loss function to solve the problem of color distortion. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has better visual feelings than other algorithms. We also calculate the peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index and average brightness of the enhanced results of different algorithms, and the results show that the proposed algorithm performs better. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.