LensStyle: Learning the Optical Aesthetics for Controllable Stylized Lens Effect Rendering

Abstract

The visual aesthetics of photographs are deeply influenced by lens characteristics such as aperture shape, optical vignetting and optical diffraction, which together define a camera's unique optical style. Existing lens effect rendering methods primarily focus on accurately simulating the blur transition from small to large apertures but overlook the stylistic aspects of lens effects. As a result, they fail to produce diverse bokeh effects under large apertures or capture distinctive photographic phenomena such as starbursts that emerge under small apertures. In this work, we introduce LensStyle, a unified framework for controllable stylized lens effect rendering that explicitly models lens aesthetics through joint continuous-discrete control. Our model incorporates a Dual-Path Controller that disentangles continuous optical parameter modulation (e.g., focus distance and blur strength) from discrete lens-style conditioning (e.g., circular, polygonal, donut, cat-eye, and starburst effects), enabling fine-grained, interpretable, and physically grounded lens manipulation within a single unified framework. To support model training, we curate a comprehensive MultiLens dataset containing multi-lens image pairs synthesized under real optical constraints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LensStyle achieves superior realism, controllability, and aesthetic quality compared with existing lens effect rendering approaches and diffusion-based image editing models, advancing computational photography toward multiple-lens-style simulation.