| Image: Adobe |
Adobe has announced A new reflection removal tool that aims to erase reflections in photos, revealing only what’s behind them. The company says its aim is to improve photos taken from reflective objects like windows or movie posters.
The tool gives you a slider that goes from -100 to 100. If you set this to 0, your photo will remain unchanged. Setting it to 100 attempts to remove any reflections, showing only what’s behind them, and setting it to -100 will attempt to show only the reflections. Of course, if this adds to your photo you can use the slider to maintain a bit of the reflection.
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| The tool attempts to segment the image, telling what is behind the reflection, and what is being reflected. |
Adobe’s blog post states that the tool does not specifically use generative AI; It doesn’t guess what should be there and tries to create it perfectly, so you don’t have to worry about adding things that weren’t really there.
The post has an in-depth explanation of how it all works, but the high-level overview is that Adobe created a bunch of photos with simulated reflections and then trained the model to predict what was behind the reflection. What was there and what the reflection looked like. It was separated. Since Adobe had the original images, it could tell how accurate the model was and make improvements.
The tool is currently labeled as a technical preview and has some notable limitations. Probably the biggest thing is that it currently only works with RAW files, not JPEG or other compressed image formats. It’s also only available in Adobe Camera Raw, though the company says it plans to “bring an expanded version to the entire Lightroom ecosystem” in the future.
Adobe admits that the tool is not perfect. For example, it currently struggles with night-time urban scenes, and is really only designed to deal with “reflections from plate glass windows that cover most or all of your field of view.” If the window with distracting reflections is only a small part of the image, it probably won’t be able to remove them. Similarly, if you are trying to remove reflections from water this can be difficult.
Nevertheless, there are many situations where the tool may be useful even in its current state. How many times have you tried to take a photo of something nice you saw out the window of a train or plane, only to have it turn out a bit messed up because of the reflections?
If you want to try Reflection Removal, open ACR, then go to Preferences > Technology Preview. Make sure the “New AI features and settings panel” box is checked, restart the app, and then open an image. There should now be a “Reflect” checkbox in the Remove panel.
