We generalize the alternating minimization algorithm recently proposed in [32] to effciently solve a general, edge-preserving, variational model for recovering multichannel images degraded by within- and cross-channel blurs, as well as additive Gaussian noise. This general model allows the use of localized weights and higher-order derivatives in regularization, and includes a multichannel extension of total variation (MTV) regularization as a special case. In the MTV case, we show that the model can be derived from an extended half-quadratic transform of Geman and Yang [14]. For color images with three channels and when applied to the MTV model (either locally weighted or not), the per-iteration computational complexity of this algorithm is dominated by nine fast Fourier transforms. We establish strong convergence results for the algorithm including finite convergence for some variables and fastﾠq-linear convergence for the others. Numerical results on various types of blurs are presented to demonstrate the performance of our algorithm compared to that of the MATLAB deblurring functions. We also present experimental results on regularization models using weighted MTV and higher-order derivatives to demonstrate improvements in image quality provided by these models over the plain MTV model.