We present an appearance-based user interface for artists to efficiently design customized image-based lighting environments. 1 Our approach avoids typical iterations of parameter editing, rendering, and confirmation by providing a set of intuitive user interfaces for directly specifying the desired appearance of the model in the scene. Then the system automatically creates the lighting environment by solving the inverse shading problem. To obtain a realistic image, all-frequency lighting is used with a spherical radial basis function (SRBF) representation. Rendering is performed using precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) to achieve a responsive speed. User experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed system compared to a previous approach.