The lifting wavelet transform (WT) has been widely applied to image coding. Recently, the total number of lifting steps has been minimized introducing a non-separable 2D structure so that delay from input to output can be reduced in parallel processing. However the minimum lifting WT has a problem that its upper bound of the rate-distortion curve is lower than that of the standard lifting WT. This is due to the rounding noise generated inside the transform in its integer implementation. This paper reduces the rounding noise introducing channel scaling. The channel scaling is designed so that the dynamic range of signal values is fully utilized at each channel inside the transform. As a result, the signal to noise ratio is increased and therefore the upper bound of the minimum lifting WT in lossy coding is improved.