Turning a Smartphone Selfie into a Studio Portrait

We introduce a novel algorithm that turns a flash selfie taken with a smartphone into a studio-like photograph with uniform lighting. Our method uses a convolutional neural network trained on a set of pairs of photographs acquired in a controlled environment. For each pair, we have one photograph of a subject's face taken with the camera flash enabled and another one of the same subject in the same pose illuminated using a photographic studio-lighting setup. We show how our method can amend lighting artifacts introduced by a close-up camera flash, such as specular highlights, shadows, and skin shine.