What is Style transfer?

Style transfer is the operation of taking the visual style of one image (color palette, lighting, brush stroke, composition logic) and applying it to the content of another. The classical 2015 implementation (Gatys et al., neural style transfer with VGG-19) gave us Prisma-style filter effects; the diffusion-era implementation (IP-Adapter, ControlNet Reference, StyleAlign, Flux Style transfer) is far more powerful and content-preserving. In AI UGC workflows, style transfer powers scene-preset application: take a generated lifestyle scene and re-render it in your brand's signature style (warm film grain, high-contrast minimal, soft-pastel matte). It also powers cross-brand visual consistency — load a single brand-style reference image, transfer that style to every persona-and-product generation downstream. This is mechanically what most 'brand style preset' features in commercial AI photo tools are.