Abstract: Designing the illumination of a scene is a difficult task because one needs to render the whole scene in order to look at the result. Obtaining the correct lighting effects may require a long sequence of modeling/rendering steps. We propose to use directly the highlights and shadows in the modeling process. By creating and altering these lighting effects, the lights themselves are indirectly modified. We believe this new technique to design lighting is more intuitive and can lead to a reduction of the number of modeling/rendering steps required to obtain the desired image.