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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
November 5, 2024
Answered

P: Reflection Removal feedback (CR & LrClassic)

  • November 5, 2024
  • 537 replies
  • 564479 views

This post applies to Adobe Camera Raw plug-in.  

 

Adobe Camera Raw team is sharing an early look of our new Reflection Removal feature, which removes reflections caused by plate glass surfaces from photos. 

 

Note: 

  • The feature currently only works on raw photos. Support for JPEGs & HEICs is added in the April 24 Update.
  • There is a known issue on some Windows machines where the feature may produce a corrupt image. We are working on a fix for the upcoming release. 

 

Check out HelpX for more detailed usage information. For more technical information on the underlying technology, please refer to this Blog post. 

 

Getting started with the Reflection Removal feature: 

  • Make sure you have the “New AI Features and Settings Panel” Technology Preview enabled in the Camera Raw plug-in Preferences dialog (requires restarting the host application to activate). 
  • Go to the Remove panel [B] , and in the “Distraction Removal” section, click on the “Reflections” checkbox. 
  • Optionally adjust the slider after the ML model is done computing. 
  • Use the rest of the Camera Raw tools just like you would otherwise. 

When using the slider, the key values to note are: 

  • 0 – the input photo
  • 100 – de-reflected (window reflections removed) photo 
  • -100 – reflection photo (what the window was reflecting towards the camera) 

 

Please try the feature and share feedback in this community forum. It would help to include details like how you access Camera Raw (via Adobe Bridge or Photoshop), your computer system details, and as much information about what you like or do not like about the resulting photo quality. Our team will continually monitor this thread to track issues to improve the future experience. 

 

When to use Reflection Removal

The feature is designed to deal with large-area reflections when shooting through windows. Many other types of reflections occur in nature and are captured in photographs, but this feature may not recognize and handle those. We plan to work on expanding the supported reflection types in the future. 

 

Example use-cases for the feature include: 

  • Looking through windows inside-out (e.g., from the car, airplane, room windows, etc.) 
  • Looking through windows outside-in (e.g., shop windows) 
  • Museums (e.g., paintings behind glass, glass case exhibits, etc.) 

 

How best to use Reflection Removal

For best results, try the new feature following these suggestions: 

  • Apply Reflection Removal before applying any other edits to the photo, except for Enhance features such as Denoise
    • The changes made to the photo may be quite profound and render any changes you already made inappropriate.
    • If you plan to use both Enhance (Denoise, Super Resolution, or Raw Details) and Reflection Removal on a photo, it is better to apply Enhance first.
  • Play with the feature slider and adjust the removal strength as appropriate.
  • If you applied Adobe Adaptive (beta) profile prior to running the Reflection Removal feature, please update it or you may see traces of removed reflections still present in the photo (Adobe Camera Raw will remind you to do this).

 

Boris Ajdin: Product Manager, Emerging Products Group 


Update (01-16-2025)

 

To improve the performance and results of this feature, it is important that examples of images that are failing to properly remove the reflections are forwarded to the team via your report.  A large variety of file formats are allowed as attachments in these forum posts. The best option is to attach your image's raw file directly to your feedback post. Note that there is a 50 MB limit on an attachment's file size. If your raw file is too large to attach, the best option is to share the file via a file-sharing service (Dropbox or similar) and then share the link in your feedback post. Thank you for continuing to provide feedback on this Tech Preview!

If you have already shared your raw file with us - thank you!

 

~Rikk

Posted by:

Correct answer Conrad_C

This reply, earlier in this thread, explains why:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/camera-raw-discussions/p-reflection-removal-feedback-cr-amp-lrclassic/m-p/15405349#M28971

 

Also, it isn’t called “glare reduction.”

537 replies

Inspiring
June 30, 2025

Even at Best setting, did not remove reflections in vehicle windscreen.

 

0 gives essentially black screen.

 

PS 26.8.1

Win 11 Home 64-bit

AMD Rysen 7 5700X

4095 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

128GB RAM

 

BTW, given that the effect is applied in ACR, you'd have thought raw files would be supported for upload, and, being Adobe, PSD files too.

 

M

Adobe Employee
July 8, 2025

This is a photo of a fire truck on a road, with people standing around it. There is not a pane of glass between the camera and those subjects of the photo. The tool has correctly detected that there is no glass blocking the view of those things. The tool has therefore removed nothing. You can checkout the Adobe blog post to learn more about what reflections the tool is designed to remove. 

 

Regarding the black image that you see when the slider is set to -100---that is correct. If there is no reflection blocking  your view of all of the subjects of the photo, then the reflection is zero---a black image. 

Known Participant
June 30, 2025

The feature is excellent in general use. I have a challenging image. My CR3 image could not be uploaded. The has two reflections in it. The Reflection Removal feature does an excellent job with the right side of the image, but does not make any change to the more serious reflection on the left side of the image. 

It would be nice if there could be a way to mask the image to Reflection Removal on one portion and leave the other portion untouched.

 

(FRANCE 20230525 Paris Montmartre Pigale - 4784.CR3).

Adobe Employee
July 8, 2025

I tested this photo myself in LrC and it worked well. The result is slightly imperfect, but not to the extent that you describe. See attached screenshot of the result. 

 

lynner18122753
Participant
June 29, 2025

I've just tried the reflection removal tool in Lightroom on a milky way shot with a pond in the foreground. I wanted to see if it would work reducing reflactions in the pond and help to bring out the star reflections, which it did . but unfortunately it made a dogs breakfast of the sky and stars. it would therefore be helpful to have a masking option with the reflection tool.

Many thanks.

Adobe Employee
July 8, 2025

Thanks for the suggestion. Would you share a screen capture of the example so I can better understand the artifacts you describe?

DustinInToronto
Known Participant
June 29, 2025

Lightroom Classic (14.4) the remove relfections tool simply does not work. After it computes, no change. In Camera Raw however it does work - and the compute time is also longer. Something is very different about the back end of the tool in CR vs LrC. 

For refrence I'm on Windows 11 Pro, 24H2, Build 26120.4452, GPU: Nvidia RTX 4070, driver: Studio 576.80

DustinInToronto
Known Participant
June 29, 2025

Potential Issue Spotted / New Solution!

Addtional notice: if I export a DNG of the file from LrC and open in CR, the reflections removal tool no longer has any affect. So back in lightroom, I reset the photo, tried again and it worked! So, remove reflections BEFORE applying edits. This worked for me. 

robworld
Participant
June 28, 2025

Thank you so much for that feature! 

It is also working great, if you have milky parts in the picture (raindrop on lens...)

Adobe Employee
July 8, 2025

Thanks for letting us know!

Participant
June 28, 2025

Rikk, while the tool works fantastically well on reflexions, the rest of the raw photo becames unfocused. This is done on originally very sharp images. 

Inspiring
June 29, 2025

Are you sure you're using the 'best' setting and not 'preview'? Preview will certainly show you a blurry pic. But on certain images, reflection removal removes too much, and you get a muddle. Adjusting the intensity slider can help. 

Participant
June 28, 2025

I was hoping this would work on eyeglasses, but it seems it does not. Do you have any plans doing something simular for eyeglass reflections?

Adobe Employee
July 8, 2025

Yes. Please checkout the Adobe blog post, which mentions that among other things.

Participating Frequently
June 27, 2025

I have tried a couple of times to use this feature to remove reflections in people's eyeglasses and it does not seem to work.  So I assume that this feature is limited to windows or larger areas.

 

Erik Bloodaxe
Legend
June 27, 2025

It is not designed to do that job so will not achieve what you desire. At least not currently.

Participant
June 27, 2025

Reflections Removal is a Great Tool

for Example for shots taken from an Airplane over water, improves photo very much

but

- takes an awful lot of time per photo (3 min). Function doesn't use parallel cpu cores, this slows it down 

- Function crashes when used on more then 4 photos in one setting, LR needs to be restarted. I'm using 64GB RAM, so it shouldn't run out on RAM

 

Adobe Employee
June 27, 2025

Please post your system information, and which quality mode is the default you are using.

Participant
June 27, 2025

This tool is very good, but it would be better if it had the way to select where one wants to fix such as a brush because it is also the case that we can help to erase the reflections of the lenses, when one takes a photograph and someone has lenses, the reflections of the Flash light come out or they would have to get a new tool that automatically erases the Flash lighting.

Adobe Employee
June 27, 2025

In the future we are looking into removing small reflections like eyeglasses and distant windows/panes of glass. To learn more about what this tool does, check out the blog