MonetGPT: Solving Puzzles Enhances MLLMs' Image Retouching Skills
Authors: name: Niladri Shekhar Dutt; name: Duygu Ceylan; name: Niloy J. Mitra
Published: 2025-05-09 16:38:27

Abstract: Retouching is an essential task in post-manipulation of raw photographs.
Generative editing, guided by text or strokes, provides a new tool accessible
to users but can easily change the identity of the original objects in
unacceptable and unpredictable ways. In contrast, although traditional
procedural edits, as commonly supported by photoediting tools (e.g., Gimp,
Lightroom), are conservative, they are still preferred by professionals.
Unfortunately, professional quality retouching involves many individual
procedural editing operations that is challenging to plan for most novices. In
this paper, we ask if a multimodal large language model (MLLM) can be taught to
critique raw photographs, suggest suitable remedies, and finally realize them
with a given set of pre-authored procedural image operations. We demonstrate
that MLLMs can be first made aware of the underlying image processing
operations, by training them to solve specially designed visual puzzles.
Subsequently, such an operation-aware MLLM can both plan and propose edit
sequences. To facilitate training, given a set of expert-edited photos, we
synthesize a reasoning dataset by procedurally manipulating the expert edits
and then grounding a pretrained LLM on the visual adjustments, to synthesize
reasoning for finetuning. The proposed retouching operations are, by
construction, understandable by the users, preserve object details and
resolution, and can be optionally overridden. We evaluate our setup on a
variety of test examples and show advantages, in terms of explainability and
identity preservation, over existing generative and other procedural
alternatives. Code, data, models, and supplementary results can be found via
our project website at https://monetgpt.github.io.