Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) v17.1 recently got a very cool new AI feature: the ability to automatically remove reflections. That’s great, but I’m even more excited about a very hack you can use with it to automatically remove lens flare! Let’s start with the intended use first.
How to remove reflections with ACR:
Under the remove tab (<B>) is the “reflections” checkbox. Simply enable it and it should do all the work. You may adjust the slider to change the amount, but I find that is rarely needed. In cases where the reflection and image content are both significant, the tool may show the reflection by default. If that happens, just move the slider to the opposite side to show the expected result. Only RAW files are supported at this time (so JPG, rasterized layers, etc will show this option greyed out).
The results are often impressively good, even though complete removal is unlikely in many cases. You will also see some artifacts and the detail would not often stand up to print without further repair. Shooting through glass isn’t something you’ll do often for serious photos and this is naturally well suited to casual photos you’re more likely to take with your phone (such as shooting food through a glass counter or animals at the zoo). Just keep in mind that you’ll need to switch to RAW capture (at least momentarily) if you want to use this feature at this point with your camera.
How to remove lens flare with ACR:
While the AI model hasn’t been trained specifically to handle lens flare, it can often help there too. After all, flare involves light hitting glass. This is some of the most painful work to do in Photoshop. It’s often technically challenging, time consuming, and the results are often not very satisfactory.
In the video below, you’ll see how simply enabling “remove reflections” removes nearly half the flare in this image. It’s a particularly nasty image where the camera is pointed directly at the sun, with an ND filter on the lens, and likely water and salt spray on the glass from the crashing waves. After getting the benefit of that 1-click fix, you can use the generative AI remove tool to remove everything else with just a few clicks. In less than a minute, the fix is good enough for social media.
Is it perfect? No, far from it. The AI fix isn’t flawless and would show issues in a print. It provides a much better starting point for manual work to fix the image. The image can be manually cleaned up with standard clone and healing techniques in far less time than it would take without using AI. The benefit here is in significantly reducing work (possibly eliminating it if you don’t need to print). A 100% flawless fix straight out of the AI is an unrealistic goal at this time. But just imagine how good this might get over time as AI improves (and especially if a model were trained to deal with this problem specifically).
How might these AI tools improve even further?
The AI content generation tools in Adobe Camera RAW are often great for social media, but won’t necessarily give you enough close detail for a print. With constant improvements in AI, that’s likely to improve significantly and ultimately be resolved. The lens flare benefits here are probably coincidental, and we could see significant benefits if Adobe or another company released a model trained to solve that specific problem. I think that’s exciting to consider for the future, and you can already use these AI results to significantly reduce the effort needed to clone out these issues. While these results aren’t always perfect, they can often save a lot of time by giving you a better starting point. And that’s ultimately the key to AI – use it with the intention of reducing work, rather than expecting it to do ALL the work.
