Techniques are disclosed for performing manipulation of facial images using an artificial neural network. A facial rendering and generation network and method learns one or more compact, meaningful manifolds of facial appearance, by disentanglement of a facial image into intrinsic facial properties, and enables facial edits by traversing paths of such manifold(s). The facial rendering and generation network is able to handle a much wider range of manipulations including changes to, for example, viewpoint, lighting, expression, and even higher-level attributes like facial hair and age—aspects that cannot be represented using previous models.