Relighting

Relighting is the post-capture process of digitally manipulating a photograph's illumination (direction, color, intensity) with the precision of a 3D computer graphics pipeline.

This technology fundamentally decouples light from the image content, enabling full illumination control after the shot. The cutting-edge approach, as demonstrated by the Simon Fraser University team at SIGGRAPH 2025, combines mid-level computer vision, physically-based rendering, and a neural renderer to achieve photorealistic results. The pipeline first infers a colored mesh representation of the scene, allowing users to define new lighting configurations (e.g., spotlights, environment maps) in 3D. This brings the explicit, physical control of a tool like Blender directly into 2D photo editing, a capability that traditional software like Photoshop lacked.

https://yaksoy.github.io/PhysicalRelighting/