Photorealistic style transfer for cinema shoots

Abstract

Color grading is the process of subtly mixing andadjusting the color and tonal balance of a movie to achievea specific visuallook. This manual editing task may requirea significant amount of work from very skilled artists andtechnicians. In many cases the director wants to emulate thestyle and look present in a reference image, e.g. a still froman existing movie, a photograph, or even a previously shotsequence in the current movie. In this paper we propose amethod that automatically transfers the style, in terms of tone,color palette and contrast, from a reference image to the sourceRAW image. It consists of three separable operations: globalluminance matching, global color transfer and local contrastmatching. The computational complexity of the procedureis extremely low and allows for real-time implementationin-camera. As it just takes into account the statistics of sourceand reference images, no training is required. The results arefree from artifacts and provide an excellent approximation tothe intended look, bringing savings in pre-production, shootingand post-production time.