
Kalyan Sunkavalli
I am a Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe Research, where I lead a team advancing generative AI for image, video, and 3D creation and editing. We develop ambitious research ideas from conception through publication, scale them into production-ready technologies, and help bring them into Adobe products used by millions of creators, including Photoshop, Substance 3D, and Firefly.
My work focuses on making visual content creation more intuitive, expressive, and controllable by combining the creative power of generative models with the structure and precision of spatial intelligence. One example is our recently released Rotate Object feature in Photoshop, which lifts single photos into 3D so creators can intuitively experiment with composition and perspective.
I received my Ph.D. from Harvard University, where I was advised by Hanspeter Pfister, and my M.S. from Columbia University, where I was advised by Ravi Ramamoorthi. I completed my undergraduate degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
Selected Shipped Features


Generative Image-to-3D in Firefly Boards

Generative Image-to-3D in Project Aqua

Generative Image-to-IBL in Firefly Enterprise

Generative Harmonization in Photoshop

Generative Text-to-3D in Substance 3D Viewer

Generative Text-to-3D in Substance 3D Stager

Harmonization Neural Filter in Photoshop

Sky Replacement in Photoshop

Match Indoor Lighting in Dimension

ML Denoiser in Dimension

Match Image (Lighting and Camera) in Dimension

Auto Smart Looks in Photoshop Elements
Publications
2026
2025
2024
2023
2022
Material Swapping for 3D Scenes using a Learnt Material Similarity Measure
WiCV Workshop, CVPR 2022
2021
2020
Deep Reflectance Volumes: Relightable Reconstructions from Multi-View Photometric Images
ECCV 2020 (spotlight)
2019
Deep View Synthesis from Sparse Photometric Images
SIGGRAPH 2019
2018
Compositing-aware Image Search
ECCV 2018
2017
Reflectance Capture using Univariate Sampling of BRDFs
ICCV 2017
2016
Single-image RGB Photometric Stereo With Spatially-varying Albedo
3DV 2016 (oral)
Removing Shadows from Images of Documents
ACCV 2016
Appearance Harmonization for Single Image Shadow Removal
Pacific Graphics 2016
2015
PatchMatch-based Automatic Lattice Detection for Near-Regular Textures
ICCV 2015
Smooth Loops for Unconstrained Video
EGSR 2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2006
First steps toward an electronic field guide for plants
Taxon 2006
2005
Parsing News Video Using Integrated Audio-video Features
PReMI 2005