Glossary
Reflection Removal
Reflection removal uses AI to clean unwanted reflections — phone outlines, fingerprints, room lights, skin oil — from polished jewelry surfaces while preserving the natural metal sheen that gives gold, silver, and platinum their look.
What does reflection removal actually fix?
On metal jewelry photographed without a light tent, you typically see four kinds of unwanted reflections: a faint outline of the camera or phone in the polished surface, fingerprints and skin oil left from handling, color casts from the room (warm yellow under tungsten, blue under daylight from a window), and harsh point reflections from individual ceiling lights. AI reflection removal targets all four at once. It does not — and should not — flatten the metal entirely; the natural sheen and tonal gradient that make gold look like gold are part of the design.
Why generic tools fail at this
Generic photo editors don't know the difference between a reflection that's part of the design (the curve of a gold ring's polished band) and one that isn't (a window outlined on that band). They either leave both untouched or smooth both away — turning the metal into a flat painted surface. A jewelry-specific model is trained on thousands of jewelry photos with and without reflections, so it learns the metal's intrinsic tonal pattern and removes only the parasitic reflections layered on top.
Hand-finished result, fraction of the time
A skilled retoucher in Photoshop fixes reflections by hand-painting metal back into the masked region using the dodge/burn tools and a soft brush at low opacity. This is the slow part of jewelry retouching — 5-15 minutes per ring for a competent hand. AI does the equivalent in 5 seconds. The output is not always perfect — for very tight macros where the reflection is the dominant pixel area, manual cleanup may still help — but for ~95% of catalog photos, AI is now indistinguishable from the manual result.
See it in action
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Last updated 2026-05-03