SynthLight: Portrait Relighting with Diffusion Model by Learning to Re-render Synthetic Faces

Sumit Chaturvedi, Mengwei Ren, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Jingyuan Liu, Julie Dorsey, Zhixin Shu; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 369-379

We introduce SynthLight, a diffusion model for portrait relighting. We frame image relighting as a re-rendering problem, where pixels are transformed in response to changes in environmental lighting. Using a physically-based rendering engine, we create a dataset to simulate this lighting-conditioned transformation with 3D head assets under varying lighting. We propose training and inference strategies to bridge the gap between the synthetic and real image domains: (1) multi-task training leveraging real human portraits without lighting labels; (2) an inference time diffusion sampling scheme based on classifier-free guidance leveraging the input portrait to better preserve details. Our method generalizes to diverse real portraits and produces realistic illumination effects, including specular highlights and cast shadows, while preserving identity. Our quantitative experiments on light stage data demonstrate results comparable to state-of-the-art relighting methods. Our qualitative results on in-the-wild images showcase rich and unprecedented illumination effects.