Image Steganography is a thriving research area of information security where secret data is embedded in images to hide its existence while getting the minimum possible statistical detectability. This paper proposes a novel magic least significant bit substitution method (M-LSB-SM) for RGB images. The proposed method is based on the achromatic component (Iplane) of the hue-saturation-intensity (HSI) color model and multi-level encryption (MLE) in the spatial domain. The input image is transposed and converted into an HSI color space. The Iplane is divided into four sub-images of equal size, rotating each sub-image with a different angle using a secret key. The secret information is divided into four blocks, which are then encrypted using an MLE algorithm (MLEA). Each sub-block of the message is embedded into one of the rotated sub-images based on a specific pattern using magic LSB substitution. Experimental results validate that the proposed method not only enhances the visual quality of stego images but also provides good imperceptibility and multiple security levels as compared to several existing prominent methods.Steganographic methods are broadly classified into spatial domain and transform domain methods. In the spatial domain, the gray levels of the original carrier image are directly modified for encoding the secret data. These techniques employ a high payload but are vulnerable to image processing manipulations and statistical attacks such as image cropping, image compressing, noise attacks and chi-square attack. Some examples of spatial domain techniques include LSB [8][9][10][11], gray-level modification method [12], edges based embedding techniques [4,[13][14][15][16], pixel indicator techniques (PIT) [17,18], pixel value differencing techniques [19,20], pixel pair matching method [21], and tri-way pixel value differencing method [22]. In transform domain, the image is converted from the spatial domain to the transform domain and the image coefficients are modified to hide secret information. These techniques have a lower payload but they are more robust against statistical attacks. Some examples of transform domain techniques are the discrete wavelength transform technique [23], discrete Fourier transform technique [24], discrete cosine transform techniques [25,26], and contourlet transform technique [27].The simplest and most basic spatial domain steganographic method is LSB substitution, which hides secret data inside a cover image. With this method, the least significant bits of the carrier image pixels are replaced with the secret data bits. Payload capacity of the LSB method can be increased if more than 1 LSBs are used for message embedding, but it makes noticeable changes in the carrier image. Wang et.al, [28] presented a genetic algorithm based on an LSB substitution scheme for improving the stego image quality. The Wang et.al, approach requires more processing time, which is its major shortcoming. To reduce the complexity of the Wang et.al, scheme, Chang et.al,[29] proposed a fast algorithm...