SFU researchers bring Blender-style lighting control to any photograph
Physically Controllable Relighting of Photographs
A SIGGRAPH 2025 method lets users drop spot lights, point lights, or environmental illumination into an ordinary photo and relight it like a 3D scene. The pipeline infers a colored mesh from monocular geometry and intrinsic estimates, renders the new lighting with path tracing, then passes that approximation through a neural renderer for photorealism. Self-supervised training on raw image collections, using differentiable rendering, gives it in-the-wild generalization.
Our method represents a significant step in bringing the explicit physical control over lights available in typical 3D computer graphics tools, such as Blender, to in-the-wild relighting.
- Tepix
That's pretty close to magick. Kudos!
- amelius
Neat! And the video was pretty interesting!
Wait ... patent pending? Research done with public money? Yuck! Downvoted immediately.
- vonneumannstan
Am I mistaken in thinking this was already doable with diffusion models?