These days, almost everyone owns a digital camera. We all want to take great photographs, but without expensive equipment, it is difficult to take professional quality pictures. Even with fancy cameras and lenses, it is often difficult to get the right setup and calibration needed to take stunning pictures.

Wouldn't it be great if you can make your pictures have the same style as those taken by a famous photographer? What if your landscapes can look like those of Ansel Adams, your portraits like those of Annie Liebovitz?

Spring of 2008, I took a class called Digital and Computational Photography (6.815) taught by Prof. Fredo Durand. For the final project, I worked with another student to implement a filter that transfered the style of one image to another. We did this by transferring the brightness/contrast, the level of detail, and the overall color balance of the image. We implemented a technique from this paper for brightness/contrast and detail transfer and developed our own technique for color transfer.

Here is a sample of our final product. The style from the image on the right is transferred to the top left image using our code. The bottom left image is the result.

DISCLAIMER: Images on this post are taken from Flickr.com and are not owned by me. My sample images are in no way a commentary on the quality of the images. I am merely trying to transfer the style of one arbitrary image to another.