A bunch of researchers from Adobe and Cornell University have come up with one of the coolest developments in imaging tech in recent times: the ability to transfer photo styles from one picture to another.
It’s kind of like Prisma, the app that applies artistic filters based on the work of well-known painters to your photos (Google and Facebook have built similar technologies too). But instead of drawing from their techniques and styles, this project mimics the colors and lighting in a photo from a reference image. Here are some examples:
That means that if you’ve got a picture of a cityscape shot on a sunny morning, you can have it look like the photo was taken at dusk by introducing a reference image photographed in the evening and with matching weather conditions. The end result won’t have any of its lines and shapes altered.
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What’s particularly impressive about the algorithm is that it can make intelligent minute adjustments like adding light to the windows of a skyscraper – similar to how a human photo retoucher would approach the challenge of mimicking a reference photo. Plus, it avoids issues like copying over the appearance of the sky from a reference image onto a building in the target photo.
To achieve this, the researchers used deep learning methods to capture the lighting and color cues from the reference image, and also worked on a way to constrain the transformation so the changes applied in a natural way to the target photo without coloring outside the lines.
Hopefully, this technology might one day make it into a commercial photo editing tool like Adobe’s Photoshop or Lightroom apps.
You can check out the research paper here and have a look at the code in this GitHub repository.
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