Editing Soft Shadows in a Digital Photograph

In this article, we develop tools for shadow modification in images where a shadowed region is characterized by soft boundaries with varying sharpness along the shadow edges. Modeling shadow edges presents an interesting challenge because they can vary from infinitely sharp edges for shadows produced by a point light source to extremely soft edges for shadows produced by large area light sources. We propose an entirely image-based shadow editing tool for a single-input image. This technique for modeling, editing, and rendering shadow edges in a photograph or a synthetic image lets users separate the shadow from the rest of the image and make arbitrary adjustments to its position, sharpness, and intensity. These machine-adjustable photographs can offer interactivity that might improve images' expressiveness and help us investigate the influence of boundary sharpness on the perception of object-to-object contact, as well as understand how humans assess shadows to estimate object height above a ground plane