AI Relight: Change and control lighting in images and videos
Lighting is one of those things that separates a good visual from a great one. It sets the mood, adds depth, and tells part of the story before anyone reads a single word. Professional photographers spend years mastering it. Cinematographers obsess over it. And until now, it was basically the one thing AI image tools couldn’t give you real control over.
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That changes with Relight. It’s a new tool in the Freepik AI Suite that lets you design, adjust, and transform lighting in both images and videos, both visually and directly. No wrestling with prompts. No touching a single slider in a traditional editor.
What is AI Relight?
It is a lighting control tool built into the Freepik AI Suite. It lets you manipulate the lighting of images and videos with the kind of precision you’d expect from a studio setup, not from an AI tool.
Relight gives you a visual interface where you can actually place and shape light. You control the direction, the elevation, the color, and the intensity. You can even upload a reference image and let the AI replicate its lighting style on your own creation.
It’s available for both images and videos, which means you can maintain consistent, intentional lighting across still visuals and motion content alike.
Think of it as a photography studio built into your AI workflow. No equipment, no setup time, no expertise required.
Benefits of using Relight
The most obvious benefit is control. Real, granular, visual control over something that generative AI has historically left up to chance.
But beyond that, here’s what Relight actually changes for creators:
You stop guessing
Prompt-based lighting is hit or miss. You write “dramatic side lighting” and get something that’s close, but not quite right. With Relight, what you see is what you get. You move the light, you see the result, you adjust. That feedback loop is faster and far less frustrating.
You produce more consistent work
Consistent lighting is what makes a set of visuals look like they belong together. Across campaigns, sequences, or full projects, Relight makes that consistency achievable, not accidental.
You reach professional quality faster
The expert presets alone can get you to a polished result in seconds. No deep knowledge of lighting theory is required.
You gain a new creative dimension
Light is a narrative tool: it shapes mood, emotion, and meaning before anyone reads a single word. Relight puts that tool in your hands in a way that wasn’t possible before with AI.
Step-by-step: How to relight a photo using AI
Getting started with Relight for images is straightforward. Here’s how it works:
- Access the tool from the Freepik AI Suite. Head to the AI Suite, go to the Image tools, and select Relight. You can also access it directly.
- Choose your image. Click Upload to either select an image from your History or upload one from your device.
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Choose your approach. You have three options:
- Use the visual lighting interface to place and adjust lights manually.
- Apply one of the expert presets for an instant professional look.
- Upload a reference image to transfer its lighting style to your image.
- Fine-tune your settings. Adjust light direction, elevation, intensity, and color.
- Generate and download. Once you’re happy with the preview, generate the final image and download it.
Step-by-step: How to relight a video using AI
Relighting video follows the same core logic, with a few extra considerations for motion:
- Go to the Video Relight tool from the AI Suite or access it directly.
- Choose your video. Click Upload to either select a video from your History or upload one from your device.
- Set your lighting. Use the visual interface, a preset, or a reference image — same as with photos.
- Preview the lighting across frames. One of the key advantages here is consistency: Relight applies lighting coherently across the entire video, so you don’t get flickering or mismatched frames.
- Generate and export. Once the result looks right, generate the final video and export it.
For motion designers and content creators working on social media videos, short-form content, or AI-assisted filmmaking, this is a significant upgrade in production quality.
Use cases for Relight
The range of applications here is broader than it might seem at first. A few worth highlighting:
Portrait and editorial photography
Lighting defines the mood. Soft portrait lighting reads warm and approachable. Dramatic side lighting reads editorial and high-fashion. And now you can choose that intentionally. No photography studio needed, no post-production retouching required.
Social media and ad creatives
Visual content for campaigns needs to stand out and feel cohesive. Relight helps you nail the look of each asset while keeping lighting consistent across a whole set of visuals.
Brand design and identity
When you’re creating multiple assets for a brand, visual consistency is non-negotiable. Relight lets you match lighting across images so everything looks like it came from the same shoot.
Cinematic video content
Mood-driven lighting is one of the defining characteristics of cinematic video. The difference between a moody neon look and a clean, bright editorial feel is lighting. Relight gives you that directorial control over AI-generated video.
Concept art and creative projects
For AI artists and designers working on more experimental work, Relight opens up a whole new dimension of visual storytelling.
Tips to get natural results with Relight
A few things worth keeping in mind as you start experimenting:
Start with a preset, then customize
The expert presets are a great starting point. They’re built by people who understand lighting. From there, you can tweak to taste rather than building from scratch.
Match lighting direction to your subject
Light coming from above reads natural and daylight-like. Light from the side adds drama and depth. Light from below is unusual and often unsettling. Think about what the scene calls for before you start placing lights.
Don’t overdo the intensity
It’s tempting to push sliders to the extreme, but subtler lighting often reads as more realistic. High-contrast lighting works for dramatic shots, but for portraits or natural scenes, a softer touch usually wins.
Use reference images from real photography
If you want a specific, real-world look, find a reference photo that captures it and let Relight do the analysis. It’s faster than trying to recreate it manually.
Think about consistency across a set
If you’re creating multiple images for the same project, decide on your lighting setup before you start and apply it consistently. This is where Relight really earns its place in a professional workflow.
Relight vs. traditional photo editing
Traditional photo editing gives you enormous control over lighting, but it requires real skill and significant time. Relight, by contrast, generates and applies lighting as part of the creative process itself, in a fraction of the time.
For someone with deep experience in traditional editing, Relight won’t replace every tool in their kit. But for the vast majority of creators (designers, marketers, social media managers, content creators), it eliminates the need to learn complex editing workflows just to get a well-lit result.
The other key difference is the reference image feature. Being able to upload a photo and have AI replicate its lighting style is something traditional editing tools simply can’t do in the same way. It’s a fundamentally different approach to achieving a look.
If you’ve been frustrated by how little control generative AI gives you over the final look of your images and videos, Relight is a direct answer to that frustration. It’s the kind of feature that changes how you think about what’s possible with AI-generated content.
