Abstract: Existing single-image-based lighting transfer algorithms have shortcomings in thoroughly separating lighting and facial details, and they are generally inefficient. With regard to these problems, a fast lighting transfer method is proposed based on some priors. At first, the prior knowledge of facial structure feature and shadow detection are used to well decompose the information of the large scale layer and the detail layer of the reference and target images, respectively. Then, the detail layer of the target image and the large scale layer of the reference image are synthesized to obtain the final transferred brightness image. Experiments demonstrate that with only a single reference image as input the method can efficiently transfer the lighting effects of the reference image to the target image, and the facial detail features of the target image can be well preserved.