Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for automatically generating datasets for a particular target expression photo effect. In one aspect, a system comprises receiving a plurality of image pairs, each comprising an original face image and an expressive face image representative of a target expression photo editing effect, generating an initial overall editing vector, wherein generating the initial overall editing vector comprises processing each image pair using a style space encoder model to generate an embedding of the original face image and an embedding of the expressive face image in an embedding space, optimizing the initial overall editing vector in accordance with one or more optimization criteria to generate an optimized overall editing vector, and applying the optimized overall editing vector to an input face image to generate a target expression face image that has the target expression photo editing effect.