How to Fix Window Reflections That Lightroom Can't Remove

Reflections in shop windows and glass doors are among the most common things you'll try to clean up in post, and Adobe's latest Lightroom update promises to make its one-click fix more reliable. When that tool still misses, a newer generative feature in Lightroom can take over, as long as you control what it changes.

Adobe's September 29 update, Lightroom 9.6 and Lightroom Classic 15.6, claims cleaner reflection removal on complex surfaces such as windows, glass, and water, with fewer smudges and less ghosting. Glyn Dewis tried it on a handful of his own window shots and got mixed results. On a frame where the window filled most of the scene, the Reflections option in the Remove panel cleared it completely, and the Amount slider let him dial the effect anywhere from the full reflection to none. On a picture of him photographing a gallery from the street, where his reflection is obvious, the same option did nothing visible. A third shot looked clean at first, until zooming in showed his teeth, beard, and glasses still ghosting through the glass around a picture frame.

His workaround uses Prompt to Edit, a generative feature in Lightroom that is still in early access. It offers preset prompts for jobs like fixing dust and scratches, colorizing a black-and-white photo, adding dense fog, or replacing a sky, and you can type your own request instead. Every request regenerates the entire photo and saves the result as a new DNG next to your original, so the fix you asked for comes with a fresh set of pixels everywhere else too. For now, the only models on offer are two versions of Google's Nano Banana 2, at 2K for 20 generative credits or 4K for 30, and you get no preview before you spend them. On a portrait with three badly reflecting windows, one of them blown out by the softbox he used to light it, a plain request to remove the reflections cleared the glass but pushed the saturation up across the frame and invented whatever sat behind the softbox's glare.

Reflections are often easier to prevent than to remove. A circular polarizer cuts glare from glass and water most strongly when you shoot at an angle to the surface, around 30 to 40 degrees off the glass, and it does very little when you stand square to the pane, which is exactly the position that puts your own reflection in the frame. For straight-on window shots, a rubber lens hood pressed flat against the glass blocks the light that creates the reflection in the first place, and a dark jacket or cloth behind you helps when the hood can't reach. For a portrait in front of a shop, moving your light so it doesn't hit the glass at the same angle as your lens keeps a softbox from turning a window into a white panel.

Telling the model not to change the color or contrast and to keep everything else the same didn't stop the saturation shift, and even the 4K version came back at a much lower resolution than the original, with lettering in the windows turned to nonsense. Dewis treats that file as raw material rather than a finished photo. He opens the original and the generated DNG together as layers in Photoshop, aligns them, and masks in only the windows, so the rest of the frame stays at full resolution. Anything the model recolored or rewrote stays hidden under the mask, and the original shows through instead.

Dewis' full masking pass, including how he handles a sign the model rewrote, is in the video above.