The paper addresses the problem of face recognition for images registered in variable lighting, which is common for real-world conditions. Presented algorithm is based on orthogonal transformation preceded by simple transformations comprising of equalization of brightness gradients, removal of spatial low frequency spectral components and fusion of spectral features depending on average pixels intensity. Two types of transformations: 2DDCT (two-dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform) and 2DKLT (two-dimensional Karhunen-Loeve Transform) were investigated in order to find the most optimal algorithm setup. The results of experiments conducted on Yale B and Yale B+ datasets show that a quite simple algorithm is capable of successful recognition without high computing power demand, as opposite to several more sophisticated methods presented recently.