An adaptive edit propagation method based on facial priors was proposed to achieve natural relighting effect of a portrait in a complex background using a single reference face. Firstly, the facial region of a reference image and the background region of a target were combined, and an edge-preserving smoothing filter was used to extract the illumination information from the combined image. Then a new edit propagation model adaptively changed with facial parameters was constructed to generate an illumination template by propagating the illumination from the facial region to the background. Finally, the illumination template and the target were multiplied in the luminance channel to achieve the relighting effect. The quantitative experiments in YaleB database show that there are averagely over 85% pixels (normalized to $$0,255$$) in a relighting effect face, whose intensity differences are less than 6 comparing with the ground true. As compared with other methods, the relighting effects of proposed method are more consistency. The conclusion shows that the proposed method achieves reliable and natural face relighting effect on portraits with different genders and backgrounds.