Plants with colored foliage provide bright colors and have long viewing periods, which is helpful to improve the ornamental value of urban landscaping. Natural pigments (chlorophyll, carotenoid and anthocyanin) are involved in light-dependent reactions and in response to biotic and abiotic stress, and the changes of their contents and proportions make the leaves show green, yellow, white and purplish-red colors. In this paper, the genetic regulation and external environment factors affecting the biosynthetic pathways of chlorophyll, carotenoids and anthocyanins are reviewed to provide a theoretical basis for explaining the color mechanism of forest tree leaves. The existing studies have shown that environmental factors such as light (photoperiod, light intensity and quality), temperature, drought and salt, and hormone variation stimulate the transcription of transcription factors and the structural genes such as HY5, PIFs and DELLA. Meanwhile, methylated and acetylated chromatin and epigenetic modification after transcription of miRNAs and lncRNAs directly or indirectly regulate the expression of biosynthesis pathway genes of the three pigments. Although the biosynthesis pathways of the three pigments are relatively clear at present, the specific regulatory patterns of the metabolism of the three pigments in colored-leaved forest trees and the environmental signals and hormones still need to be further clarified. In the future, we can construct hybrid populations and Germplasm Resource Bank of colored-leaved plants and make use of genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabonomic, phenomic technologies to create new germplasm of colored leaves.