How to Remove Reflections From Faces in Photoshop 2026

Remove Reflections From Faces in One Pass

Glare on skin has always been one of the genuinely miserable retouching jobs. Window light across a forehead, a studio strobe caught on a cheekbone, reflections thrown up by glasses — fixing them by hand means cloning and healing while trying to preserve skin texture that’s already been blown out. It’s slow, and it usually still looks retouched.

Photoshop 2026’s Reflection Removal does the bulk of that automatically, on its own layer, using zero generative credits. It also occasionally removes an arm. The technique below uses the tool for what it’s good at and puts a mask in front of everything it gets wrong.

Why Glare Is So Hard to Fix Manually

The Texture Is Already Gone

A specular highlight on skin isn’t just bright — it’s clipped. There’s no pore detail left underneath to recover, which is why dodging and burning never quite fixes it and why cloning from elsewhere on the face rarely matches.

It Follows the Face’s Contours

Reflections wrap around a nose, a cheekbone, a brow ridge. Any patch you clone in has to follow that same three-dimensional form, which is what makes hand repairs take so long and read as flat when they’re rushed.

No Credits, Which Matters

Reflection Removal analyzes the image rather than generating new content, so it doesn’t touch your generative credit balance. You can run it on an entire shoot without thinking about cost.

Run the Automatic Removal

Two settings in the dialog matter, and both defaults are wrong for this workflow.

1. Select Your Image Layer

   Click the main image layer in the Layers panel.

2. Open Edit > Reflection Removal

   It’s in the top Edit menu, not in the contextual taskbar — which is why plenty of people haven’t found it yet.

3. Create a Separate Reflection Layer, Quality Best

   Check the option to put the result on its own layer, and set the quality dropdown to Best. The separate layer is what makes the next section possible — without it, the removal is baked in and you can’t undo it selectively. Click OK and let Photoshop analyze the image.

Mask Back What It Got Wrong

The tool is aggressive. It regularly reads a bare arm, a light-coloured sleeve, or a bright patch of clothing as a reflection and removes it. Rather than fighting that, hide the whole thing and paint back only the face.

4. Add an Inverted (Black) Mask

   Hold Alt/Option and click the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. That creates a black mask, which hides the reflection-removal layer entirely and returns you to your original image.

5. Paint the Face Back In With White

   Press B for the Brush Tool, set your foreground colour to white, and paint over the subject’s face. Only the areas you paint get the reflection-free version — everything else, including that arm it deleted, stays exactly as you shot it.

This “hide everything, reveal deliberately” pattern is worth internalising for any automatic tool. It’s faster than correcting an over-eager result and it makes every decision reversible. The same logic underpins our free guide to AI depth masking.

Clean Up What Survives

Stubborn glare tends to persist around the hairline and along the top of the cheekbones, where the reflection blends into genuinely bright areas.

6. Paint Over the Remaining Glare

   Grab the Selection Brush Tool and paint over what’s left. Stay off the eyes — generative tools reconstruct irises and lashes badly, and it’s immediately obvious.

7. Generative Fill With Firefly Fill and Expand

   Click Generative Fill in the contextual taskbar and choose the Firefly Fill and Expand model from the selector. Generate with no prompt. You get three skin variations — cycle all three, because one is usually noticeably better matched than the others.

Where This Goes Wrong

Skipping the Separate Layer

Run Reflection Removal without checking that box and the result is applied directly to your image. Every mistake it makes is now permanent, and the whole masking approach is unavailable.

Painting Over the Eyes

Generative Fill invents plausible-looking eyes, and plausible is not the same as the ones your subject has. Mask around them and fix any remaining catchlight issues by hand.

Accepting the First Variation

Three options come back for a reason. The difference between them is usually skin tone continuity at the edges of the fill, which is exactly what gives a retouch away.

Removing Every Highlight

Skin is supposed to have some specularity. Strip all of it and the face goes flat and matte, which reads as heavily edited even though technically nothing is wrong. Paint back only the glare that’s genuinely distracting.

What the Tool Changes About Retouching

The interesting shift isn’t that glare removal got faster — it’s that it moved from a repair job to a selection job. The hard part used to be reconstructing skin. Now the hard part is deciding which reflections should go and which are just how light behaves on a face.

That’s a better problem to have, and it’s a judgment call rather than a technical one. A portrait with zero specular highlight looks like a mannequin; a portrait with a window reflected across the forehead looks like a mistake. The right answer is somewhere in between and it moves depending on the shot.

Try It on a Difficult Frame

Edit > Reflection Removal with a separate layer at Best quality, Alt-click for a black mask, paint the face back in white, then Selection Brush plus Generative Fill on whatever’s left. Download the free sample image and PSD and run it through — then find a portrait you gave up on because of window glare, because that’s the shot this tool actually rescues. For a full portrait workflow around it, our PRO Natural Light Portrait Editing course covers the rest.

Quick Reference: Keys, Menus and Settings

• Run itClick the Background layer, Edit > Reflection Removal
• OptionsCreate separate reflection layer on, Quality: Best; no generative credits
• What you getA reflection layer (only the reflections) and a reflection removal layer above the original
• Show it only on the faceOn the removal layer, Option/Alt-click Add Layer Mask (black), then B and paint white over the face
• Check what it didShift-click the mask to toggle it
• Leftover glareSelection Brush over the spot (not the eyes), Generative Fill, model selector > Firefly Fill and Expand, Generate, pick a variation
• CreditsThe credits icon > Features shows what Generative Fill costs on your plan

Mac first, then Windows where they differ.