From noon to sunset: interactive rendering, relighting, and recolouring of landscape photographs by modifying solar position

Abstract

Image editing is a commonly studied problem in computer graphics. Despite the presence of many advanced editing tools, there is no satisfactory solution to controllably update the position of the sun using a single image. This problem is made complicated by the presence of clouds, complex landscapes, and the atmospheric effects that must be accounted for. In this paper, we tackle this problem starting with only a single photograph. With the user clicking on the initial position of the sun, our algorithm performs several estimation and segmentation processes for finding the horizon, scene depth, clouds, and the sky line. After this initial process, the user can make both fine- and large-scale changes on the position of the sun: it can be set beneath the mountains or moved behind the clouds practically turning a midday photograph into a sunset (or vice versa). We leverage a precomputed atmospheric scattering algorithm to make all of these changes not only realistic but also in real-time. We demonstrate our results using both clear and cloudy skies, showing how to add, remove, and relight clouds, all the while allowing for advanced effects such as scattering, shadows, light shafts, and lens flares.