Computational Flash Photography through Intrinsics

Published: 2023, Last Modified: 15 Nov 2025CVPR 2023EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Flash is an essential tool as it often serves as the sole controllable light source in everyday photography. However, the use of flash is a binary decision at the time a photograph is captured with limited control over its characteristics such as strength or color. In this work, we study the computational control of the flash light in photographs taken with or without flash. We present a physically moti-vated intrinsic formulation for flash photograph formation and develop flash decomposition and generation methods for flash and no-flash photographs, respectively. We demonstrate that our intrinsic formulation outperforms alternatives in the literature and allows us to computationally control flash in in-the-wild images.
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