Photographic Lighting Design with Photographer-in-the-Loop Bayesian Optimization

It is important for photographers to have the best possible lighting configuration at the time of shooting; otherwise, they need post-processing on images, which may cause artifacts and deterioration. Thus, photographers often struggle to find the best possible lighting configuration by manipulating lighting devices, including light sources and modifiers, in a trial-and-error manner. In this paper, we propose a novel computational framework to support photographers. This framework assumes that every lighting device is programmable; that is, its adjustable parameters (e.g., orientation, intensity, and color temperature) can be set using a program. Using our framework, photographers do not need to learn how the parameter values affect the resulting lighting, and even do not need to determine the strategy of the trial-and-error process; instead, photographers need only concentrate on evaluating which lighting configuration is more desirable among options suggested by the system. The framework is enabled by our novel photographer-in-the-loop Bayesian optimization, which is sample-efficient (i.e., the number of required evaluation steps is small) and which can also be guided by providing a rough painting of the desired lighting configuration if any. We demonstrate how the framework works in both simulated virtual environments and a physical environment, suggesting that it could find pleasing lighting configurations quickly in around 10 iterations. Our user study suggests that the framework enables the photographer to concentrate on the look of captured images rather than the parameters, compared with the traditional manual lighting workflow.