Bilateral filtering can effectively smooth synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images with preserving the edges, but it is difficult to configure the parameters of bilateral filtering to the optimum. The iterative method to configure the parameters with high precision and efficiency has been presented, but the iterative process may be aborted incorrectly. In this paper, we present a modified configuration method to get the optimal trade-off parameters, and give the proof of the convergence of the method. The experimental results on real SAR images show that the modified method can not only obtain equivalent visibility as the iterative method, but also higher accuracy of the gray value similarity variance than that under identical iterative precision. With the iterative precision improved, the convergence rate of the modified method is faster than that of the iterative method.