Adobe has created a new experimental tool for removing window reflections from photos. The feature was first announced at Adobe Max 2023 under the name “Project See Through” and is available for preview in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Bridge right now if you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber, with support for Adobe Lightroom coming soon.
If you’ve ever taken a picture of something through a storefront window, you’ve likely encountered your own reflection or various light streaks and distortions that ruin the image. Adobe’s Reflections Removal tool (now called Project See Through) is designed to make removing these reflections much easier.
The tool uses artificial intelligence that can isolate two separate images: the reflection and what is on the other side of a window or reflective material. The training data that Adobe used to train its AI was created from thousands of photographs without reflections, which were combined in pairs to create composite images with simulated reflections. The AI model was tasked with determining which two original images were used to create the composite, for which Adobe engineers could reward or penalize it until the model’s accuracy improved.
The final product works best with reflections that occupy the entire field of view of the image. In particular, Adobe claims that the reflection removal tool cannot handle “reflections from small or distant windows” 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. The Adobe tool was able to make the lenses of the sunglasses miraculously transparent, revealing part of the background behind them, but not remove the reflection completely.
If you want to try this feature for yourself, Adobe says you can go to the settings panel in the Camera RAW plugin, enable the “New Settings and AI Features panel,” and then restart the app from which you are accessing the plugin. Once you’ve uploaded your photo, the Reflections Removal tool appears in the Remove panel under the Remove Distractions section.
Removing reflections is just one small example of how Adobe has been trying to integrate artificial intelligence into its creative programs over the past few years. The company has been focusing on generative AI, first with the image generation capabilities of Adobe Firefly, and more recently, in October 2024, with video.
