Abstract: In this paper, we proposed a method to recover the reflectance and shading images of face images, such as portraits, captured under complex lighting conditions. Under such lighting conditions, traditional intrinsic image decomposition can hardly be applied on face images especially with cast shadows. Inspired by the fact that the face symmetry is an inherent property of reflectance image for human face, face symmetry is firstly exploited as a constraint into traditional intrinsic decomposition framework to obtain the initial reflectance image. To remove the artifacts of the initial reflectance image caused by cast shadows, we use the skin color model to refine the reflectance image. Experiments show that our method is effective for face images under complex lighting conditions.