When mapping between color spaces, one wishes to find image-specific transformations preserving as much as possible the structure of the original image. Using image Laplacians to capture structural information, we show that if color transformations between two images are structure-preserving the respective Laplacians are approximately jointly diagonalizable (i.e., they commute). Using Laplacians commutativity as a criterion of color mapping quality, we minimize it w.r.t. the parameters of a color transformation to achieve optimal structure preservation.