Adobe has a new experimental tool for removing window reflections from photos. The feature was originally announced at Adobe Max 2023 as “Project See Through” and is available to preview in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Bridge right now if you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber, with Adobe Lightroom support coming soon.
If you’ve ever taken a photo of something through a shop window, you’ve likely dealt with your own reflection or a variety of light streaks and distortions ruining the image. Adobe’s Reflection Removal tool (as Project See Through is referred to now) is designed to make those reflections a lot easier to remove.
The tool uses AI that can isolate two separate images: the reflection and whatever is on the other side of the window or reflective material. The training data Adobe used to teach its AI was built from thousands of reflection-free photos that were combined in pairs to create composite images with simulated reflections. The AI model was given the task of determining what two original images the composite was made from, which Adobe engineers could then reward or penalize until the model’s accuracy improved.
The final product works best with reflections that take up the entire field of view of the image. Specifically, Adobe says the Reflection Removal tool can’t handle “reflections from windows that are small or far away” or reflections from “wine glasses, car bodies, or clouds reflected in a lake.” Engadget was able to test the feature on a reflection in a pair of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses and came to a similar conclusion. Adobe’s tool was able to make the lenses of the sunglasses oddly clearer, revealing some of the background behind them, but not remove the reflection entirely.
If you want to try the feature for yourself, Adobe says you can go to the Preferences Panel in the Camera RAW plug-in, enable the “New AI Settings and Features Panel,” and then restart whatever app you’re accessing the plug-in from. Once you’ve uploaded a photo, the Reflection Removal tool will be in the Remove panel under the Distraction Removal section.
Reflection Removal is just one small example of how Adobe has been trying to integrate AI into its suite of creative apps in the last few years. The company has been putting most of its attention towards generative AI, first with Adobe Firefly’s image generation capabilities, and more recently in October 2024, video generation, too.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cameras/adobes-new-photoshop-tool-can-clean-away-window-reflections-235855968.html?src=rss
