A biological observation apparatus comprising: an illuminating section that irradiates light to a living body that is a subject to be examined； an image pickup section that photoelectrically converts light reflected from the living body based on the irradiating light and creates an image pickup signal； and a signal processing control section that controls operations of the illuminating section and/or the image pickup section and outputs the image pickup signal to a display device, wherein the signal processing control section includes: a spectral signal creating section that creates a spectral signal corresponding to an optical wavelength narrowband image from the image pickup signal through signal processing； and a color adjusting section that, when outputting the spectral signal to the display device, allocates a different color tone for each of a plurality of bands forming the spectral signal, further wherein the biological observation apparatus further comprises an image quality adjusting section that adjusts an image quality of a signal to be outputted to the display device, or, with the exception of at least the spectral signal creating section and the color adjusting section, the other signal processing sections are shared for respective signal processing on the image pickup signal and on the spectral signal.
