What knowledge should I gain for developing a supervised image processing software that learns how to edit photos based on past behavior?
From the description of your problem, you need both Computer Vision and Deep Learning for a task like that. It is going to be extremely difficult, but you are more in advantage than anyone else, given you have a strong statistical and machine learning background. You don't have to worry a lot about the image processing part as there are libraries that will do that for you. You can look into PIL for that.The hard part is the learning from the edits part.A simpler way to solve this problem would be to focus on image processing and pick out the cell line clearly. The other way would be to train a Convnet on a large collection of 'labelled-images' of the cell-line, so that it is able to identify it in any picture. I do think it is quite a hard problem to solve but do give it a try. Cheers. All the best.