How to Remove Reflections and Fix Colors in Product Photos (Photoshop Guide)
High-gloss products are a photographer’s nightmare. Here’s how to remove distracting reflections, correct colors accurately, and export files that match the physical product, using Photoshop’s core retouching tools.
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High-gloss products are a photographer’s nightmare. Perfume bottles, polished electronics, lacquered plastics, shiny jewelry, they all act like mirrors. Point a camera at them, and you get the studio lights, the light stand, and sometimes even your own face staring back at you in the final file.
Product retouching in Photoshop is the standard fix for this kind of problem. But removing reflections without flattening the product’s natural sheen, or correcting colors without pushing them into “obviously edited” territory, is where most DIY retouching falls apart. Get it wrong, and you end up with a product that looks digitally painted – or worse, a color that doesn’t match what lands on your customer’s doorstep.
Research by SaleCycle found that as many as 64% of returns happen because the product didn’t match what the customer expected from the images and descriptions. Color retouching and reflection work are closely connected, and this guide covers both, step by step. If you’d rather hand these edits off to a pro, Path’s photo retouching services handle reflection removal, beauty airbrushing, dust removal, and color correction, starting at $0.79 per image.
Step 1: Start With a Clean Clipping Path
Before you touch any reflections or colors, you need to isolate the product cleanly. This is the foundation of all product photo retouching in Photoshop.
Why “Select Subject” often fails on glossy products:
Photoshop’s AI selection tools work well on matte surfaces. But on dark plastics, glass, or transparent bottles, they often either eat into the product edge or pull parts of the background into the subject. That usually leaves you with fringing that gets worse once you start painting or retouching around the edge. The more reliable fix is the Pen Tool (P).
How to do it
1. Select the Pen Tool from the toolbar (or press P).
2. In the Options Bar at the top, set the mode to Path and choose Combine Shapes.
3. Click around the product edge, pulling the handles on curves to follow the contour. Take your time on curved glass, glossy packaging, or rounded corners.
4. Close the path by clicking back on your first anchor point.
5. In the Paths panel (Window > Paths), click the panel menu and choose Save Path. Name it clearly.
6. From the Paths panel menu, choose Make Selection, set the Feather Radius to 0, and click OK.
7. Then go to Select > Modify > Contract and enter 1px. This nudges the selection inward so you don’t end up with background artifacts on the edge.
8. In the Layers panel, click the Add Layer Mask icon. Your product is now isolated non-destructively.
For a full walkthrough of the Pen Tool itself, this step-by-step guide to creating a clipping path in Photoshop covers it in more detail.
Step 2: Remove Distracting Reflections
With the product cleanly isolated, you can now work on the surface without accidentally affecting the background. There are three methods here, and the one you use depends on the size and complexity of the reflection.
Method A: Spot Healing Brush and Patch Tool for Small Hot Spots
For small specular highlights, dust specks, or minor glare on a relatively flat surface, the Spot Healing Brush (J) is the fastest option.
- Select the Spot Healing Brush, set it to Content-Aware, and paint over the problem area.
- Photoshop samples the surrounding texture and fills in the spot.
For larger patches, use the Patch Tool (J)
- Draw a selection around the unwanted reflection, then drag that selection to a clean area of the product.
- Photoshop blends the two areas together.
These tools work well on matte or low-texture surfaces. On highly curved surfaces, like glass bottles, they can start to produce muddy results, which is when you need a different approach.
Method B: Frequency Separation for Glossy Plastic and Smooth Surfaces
This is the technique professional retouchers use when they need to smooth out uneven light reflections without destroying the surface texture underneath. It’s the more advanced option, but it becomes useful when simpler tools start making the surface look muddy or overworked.
Frequency separation works by splitting the image into two layers: a low-frequency layer (color and tone) and a high-frequency layer (fine texture and detail). That lets you smooth the low-frequency layer without touching the high-frequency layer, so the texture stays intact.
How to set it up:
1. Duplicate your product layer twice. Name the lower copy Low Frequency and the upper copy High Frequency.
2. Select the Low Frequency layer. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Apply a blur just strong enough to remove the visible texture (typically 2–5px for product photography). Click OK.
3. Select the High Frequency layer. Go to Image > Apply Image. In the dialog box:
- Set Layer to your Low Frequency layer
- Set Blending to Subtract
- Set Scale to 2
- Set Offset to 128.
- Click OK.
4. Change the High Frequency layer blend mode to Linear Light. The image should now look exactly like the original, but you’ve separated tone from texture.
5. Work on the Low Frequency layer with the Brush Tool at low opacity to gently blend out the choppy reflection areas.
Method C: Clone Stamp at Low Opacity for Camera Reflections in Curved Glass
A camera lens reflection in a perfume bottle or a piece of jewelry is one of the most common problems in ecommerce product photography. The reflection often lands on a curved surface, which means you can’t just paint over it.
The goal isn’t to wipe the highlight out completely. You want to reduce it to the point where it looks like a natural light source.
1. Select the Clone Stamp tool. Set the Opacity to 15–25% and Flow to 30–40% in the Options Bar
Hold Alt (Option on Mac) and click to sample a clean area of the curved surface near the reflection.
2. Paint over the reflection in short, overlapping strokes. Build the coverage gradually so it blends naturally with the surface curvature.
3. Zoom out regularly to check that the highlight looks natural, not flat. If the surface looks like it has lost all its dimension, you’ve gone too far.
This is also covered in this guide on how reflections are made and removed in Photoshop.
Step 3: Get Your Colors Right
Once the reflections are under control, the next step is color accuracy. This matters more than most people realize. Mixed studio lighting, wrong white balance, and inconsistent monitors all push a product’s color away from how it actually looks in real life.
Set the White Point First
Before touching saturation or hue, fix the white point. A neutral white in your image gives every other color the right baseline.
1. Add a Levels adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels, or press Cmd/Ctrl + L).
2. Select the White Point Eyedropper (the rightmost of the three eyedroppers in the Levels dialog).
3. Click on the brightest neutral area in your image, ideally a white background, a white label, or the lightest part of the product packaging
If you’re working on a product with no neutral white, use a Curves adjustment layer instead. Add a point to the highlights and gently lower it until the whites look clean and neutral rather than warm or cool.
Saturation vs. Vibrance: Use the Right Tool
Over-saturating a product image is one of the most common mistakes in ecommerce color retouching. A deep blue jacket that looks vivid on screen can look flat and wrong when it arrives at someone’s door. That kind of mismatch does not just look off. It also increases the risk of returns.
- Use Vibrance (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Vibrance) rather than Saturation to boost color. Vibrance increases the saturation of muted colors without over-amplifying colors that are already saturated, which gives a more natural result.
- If you need to target a specific color, for example a fabric that’s going slightly orange under warm studio lights, add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer. Click the color channel dropdown (default: Master) and select the specific hue range you want to adjust.
Export With the Correct Color Profile
This step is often skipped, and it causes real problems. If your file uses Adobe RGB or another wide-gamut profile, the colors can shift when browsers and ecommerce platforms display the image. Most web environments interpret images in sRGB,, which is the standard color space for web display and was (originally developed by HP and Microsoft for consistent screen rendering).
Before exporting:
1. Go to Edit > Convert to Profile.
2. In the Destination Space dropdown, select sRGB IEC61966-2.1.
3. Click OK, then export your file.
This helps ensure that the product color your customer sees in their browser matches what you approved on your calibrated monitor.
Step 4: Add a Grounding Shadow
Remove the background, and your product can start to look like it’s floating. That “floating product” problem might seem minor, but it affects how buyers read the image. A product without any ground contact looks unfinished and less believable.
A simple contact shadow usually fixes it:
- Create a new layer beneath your product layer. Name it Shadow.
- Select a soft round brush. Set the hardness to 0%, opacity to 20–30%, and color to black.
- Paint a narrow, elliptical shadow directly beneath the product’s base, following its footprint.
- Reduce the layer opacity until the shadow looks subtle rather than theatrical. Around 30–50% opacity usually feels natural.
If this is sitting above a surface (like a perfume bottle on a glass shelf), add a second, smaller shadow directly below for the contact point, and a larger, softer shadow below that for the cast.
For a more detailed breakdown of how shadows affect product perception and conversion, this guide on avoiding the floating product problem that kills conversion rates walks through the logic in depth.
Step 5: When AI Reflection Removal Fails
AI-powered “one-click” tools for reflection removal have improved significantly. On simple, flat surfaces with minor glare, they can produce acceptable results.But on complex surfaces – curved glass, polished metal, multi-faceted jewelry – they tend to fall short.
The reason is fairly specific: AI tools usually sample neighboring pixels to fill in the area where a reflection has been removed.
On a curved surface, those neighboring pixels contain the natural sheen and highlight of the material. So when the unwanted reflection is removed, some of that dimension often goes with it too. The product can start to look flat, over-processed, or plasticky.
That is the difference between an “acceptable” edit and a retail-ready one. A retail-ready image still looks like the real product. The sheen is still there. The material still reads correctly. Nothing looks airbrushed into a graphic.
This is why product photography retouching is still largely a manual discipline.
For a broader look at what separates basic photo editing from precision retouching, this breakdown of what photo editing is and when retouching is the right tool is a useful reference.
Ready to send your photo edits our way? Get started now—and get your edits back in as little as 6 hours.
Get Retail-Ready Product Photos Without the Hours in Photoshop
Product retouching in Photoshop is a balance between technical accuracy and visual judgment. The technical side covers things like color profiles, frequency separation, and layer structure. The judgement side is knowing when a highlight looks natural versus processed, and when a shadow grounds a product versus when the edit has gone too far.
When you’re working through a large catalog, that balance takes time to get right on every image. Path’s team of professional retouchers handles reflection removal, dust and scratch cleanup, beauty airbrushing, and color correction by hand, with turnaround starting from 6 hours.
More than 40,000 businesses have trusted Path with over 8 million images. Rated Excellent on Trustpilot with a 4.8/5 score from more that 12,000 reviews, Path is built for brands that need polished, consistent product images without the post-production bottleneck. Try Path for free.
