What Happened to the Adobe MAX Ps "Sneak" to Remove Reflections?

[Fotomaker01RA]

That was such a great prototype/simulation in 2023 that would be of practical use for a fair number of photo processing projects. I haven't seen any mentions of it from beta users yet either (of which I'm not one...).

Will it be beta'd for commercial release this year? I hope so.

[John Waller]

If you mean this one, it was actually a Lightroom Classic sneak.

Remove IMPOSSIBLE Reflections in photos. Adobe Sneak peek (youtube.com)

[Trevor.Dennis]

Project See Through. As John says, that was for Lightroom Classic, but Sneaks in general, are not a preview of features to come, but rather a showcase of things the Development Teams are working on.

Ones that come to mind are the camera shake sharpening Sneak from MAX 2011.  We did eventually get that tool in Photoshop many years later, but it never came remotely close to how well it worked in the demonstration, and Adobe removed it a while back.

The one that really had me going was Extract Shading in MAX 2015.  I was so excited by that one, as it would make for much more convincing composites, but it never happened.  Our Chuck Uebele knows some of the developers, and says it didn't work so they killed it.  That was sad.

We still get super excited by the Sneaks despite knowing they might never happen.  I especially like the Illustrator Sneak from last year were it recognised raster text, identified the font, and turned it into live text.  The OCR aspect of that has been around forever, but I thought that in its entirety, it was very cool indeed, and I rarely use Illustrator!

[John Waller]

That was such a great prototype/simulation in 2023 that would be of practical use for a fair number of photo processing projects.

That's the thing about sneaks: are they good enough, day in, day out for practical use on real world projects?

Sneaks are usually lab-only demos showcased in perfect conditions with perfect examples. We've learnt that some sneaks will become real features, others won't see the light of day after rigorous testing. Remove Reflections may still be on the drawing board.