Photoshop gets AI powered reflection removal – here’s how to use it

Adobe has updated Photoshop with another artificial intelligence-backed feature. The company’s latest tool allows for heavy reflections to be removed from images, but only from RAW images for the time being.

It’s part of the ongoing updates for Photoshop 2025, which was released in October. By analyzing the image, Photoshop detects the reflection and the intended target of the photo. In the blog, Adobe admits that the AI “mixes up” the reflection and wanted scene, which is why it provides a slider.

In our testing, the model works as intended, but struggles with smaller reflections like those on glasses. It also requires you to edit around the removal effect, as it either darkens or lightens the image excessively.

Right now, the reflection remover is limited to RAW images. It’s not explained in the Adobe blog, but it’s presumed that thanks to RAW photos containing far more data compared to JPG or PNG, it’s able to work better with the AI.

Adobe’s AI push has seen it directly integrate image generation into its suite of apps. Video editing app, Premiere Pro, has an auto-caption generator for example. Photoshop, however, has seen the most additions. On top of image generation, it can leverage generative AI to assist with removing elements from photos.

The company has been moving in this direction for nearly a decade, as in 2015 it introduced its machine learning backend, Adobe Sensei. This provided the “Content Aware” tool, which scanned the images and layers of the file, and can “create” an estimation to mask something in the image.

With generative AI, it not only pulls from the image in the file, but also from Adobe’s trained models and backend.

How to use AI reflection removal in Photoshop 2025

• To get the feature, you’ll need to upgrade to Photoshop 2025 in the Creative Cloud app
• After that, it’ll automatically update the Camera RAW plugin to 17.1
• Open Photoshop and open Camera RAW by pressing Shift + Ctrl + A on Windows or Shift + Cmd + A on macOS
• In the corner, press the setting button, and in the menu press Technology Previews
• Press OK and then restart Photoshop itself
• Load up your RAW image and press the eraser button the side of Camera RAW
• Check “Distraction Removal” and it’ll begin to analyze the image for reflections to remove

Featured image: Adobe’s reflection removal library