Can software estimate the lighting setup from an existing photo?
Asked 6/10/2011
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Is there software that can analyze a photo or a selected region and estimate the lighting used to create it, such as number and direction of light sources, softness, color, reflections, or shadows? I’m wondering whether this is practical for recreating the lighting in a scene from a single finished image.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
15y ago
2 Answers
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Frankly, no - not with currently available software. There may be research going on here and who knows what the future holds, but right now, no.
There's waay too much information for the software to process to make a go at it - especially at a consumer level. At the very least, you'd have to have some way to tell the software what the subject looked like UNLIT. Thats the advantage a human has - we have a pre-visualization in our minds of what the subject would look like normally. This allows a person to say "well, he doesn't NORMALLY have a fading dark area there or a bright spot over there".
Additionally, there's MANY different ways to produce the same effect in lighting (although many are more common than others).
Originally by user1917. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1917
15y ago
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Not reliably from a single finished photo. In practice, there isn’t consumer software that can look at an image region and accurately tell you the full lighting setup used.
The main issue is that the problem is heavily underconstrained: a photo doesn’t contain enough information to uniquely recover all the unknowns. Many different lighting setups can produce very similar results, and software usually doesn’t know what the subject or scene looked like before it was lit. Humans do better because we use prior knowledge about how faces, objects, and materials normally look.
There has been research on illumination estimation from images, but results are limited and usually aimed at computer vision tasks rather than giving photographers a practical “here’s your exact lighting recipe” tool.
So: software may estimate some broad cues like likely light direction or general illumination, but not a complete, dependable reconstruction of source count, softness, duration, motion, and reflectors from one image alone.
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