Tabletop computed lighting for practical digital photography.

We apply simplified image-based lighting methods to reduce the equipment, cost, time, and specialized skills required for high-quality photographic lighting of desktop-sized static objects such as museum artifacts. We place the object and a computer-steered moving-head spotlight inside a simple foam-core enclosure and use a camera to record photos as the light scans the box interior. Optimization, guided by interactive user sketching, selects a small set of these photos whose weighted sum best matches the user-defined target sketch.

Editing soft shadows in a digital photograph.

This technique for modeling, editing, and rendering shadow edges in a photograph or a synthetic image lets users separate the shadow from the rest of the image and make arbitrary adjustments to its position, sharpness, and intensity.