How to Remove Glare from Product Photos (Without Ruining the Texture)
Written by Naman Kasliwal
Founder & CEO at kaptured.ai
Glare is the silent killer of ecommerce product photography. A single hotspot on a watch face, a window reflection on a lacquered handbag, an over-bright spot on a gemstone — each one shifts the product from “ready to ship” to “ready to be rejected by Amazon’s QA bot”.
This guide covers the three approaches that work in production: AI-first cleanup, traditional Photoshop techniques, and shoot-side prevention. We’ll focus on which one fits which use case, because the right approach depends on your catalog size, brand, and budget.
Why glare is a marketplace-listing killer
Amazon’s main-image rules are explicit: pure white background, product fills 85% of the frame, no props or text. Implicit in these rules is “no distortion that prevents the customer from evaluating the product”. Hotspots violate this. So do plastic-wrap shines, window reflections, and lens flares.
Myntra, Nykaa, Meesho, and Ajio enforce similar standards in their seller catalog rules. Brands that ship glare-ridden imagery either lose ranking or get listings outright rejected.
The conversion impact is even more direct. Customers can’t see the product’s colour, can’t judge the texture, can’t tell the actual finish. Hotspots are the digital equivalent of a smudge on a window display.
Approach 1: AI-first glare removal
The fastest, cheapest path for any brand operating at catalog scale.
The workflow:
- Upload the source image.
- The AI auto-detects the brightest hotspots — typically lens flares, window reflections, studio overlights, and plastic-wrap shines.
- Reconstruction rebuilds the underlying texture under each hotspot, matching the surrounding fabric grain, metal lustre, or material finish.
- Export at marketplace-compliant resolution.
What makes modern AI glare removal work is the texture-aware reconstruction. Generic image-cleanup tools “smooth over” hotspots and end up flattening the surface — the metal looks plastic, the leather looks like paper, the gem loses its fire. Tools tuned for product photography (like Kaptured.AI’s glare remover) separate the unwanted hotspot from the product’s natural shine and only remove the former.
The economics matter. AI glare removal costs around $0.85 per image on the Software plan. A skilled Photoshop retoucher costs $15-$50 per image at typical production agency rates. For a 500-SKU catalog refresh, that’s $425 vs $7,500-$25,000.
For jewelry catalogs specifically, the workflow is transformative. Polished metals and faceted gems are the hardest categories to shoot cleanly — sunlight bouncing off a diamond, studio overlights catching the bezel of a watch, the lens flare from a single point source on a polished ring. AI glare removal at catalog scale removes a major QA bottleneck that previously required either expensive cross-polarised lighting setups or a dedicated retoucher.
Approach 2: Traditional Photoshop / Lightroom
Still the highest-quality option for one-off editorial campaign work.
The standard Photoshop workflow:
- Open the source image at full resolution.
- Use the Clone Stamp tool with a small brush, sampling matched texture from a clean adjacent area.
- For larger hotspots, use Content-Aware Fill to suggest a fill, then refine with Clone Stamp.
- Adjust the layer’s blend mode to “Darken” so it only affects pixels brighter than the sample.
- Use Adjustment Layers (Curves, Selective Color) to balance the surrounding area.
- Export with appropriate sharpening for the destination channel.
This approach gives maximum control but is slow. A skilled retoucher handles 20-40 images per day depending on complexity. For a catalog refresh of any meaningful size, the time and cost rule it out as the primary workflow.
Where Photoshop wins: editorial campaign imagery where the brand has invested in art direction and every pixel matters. The hero image for a luxury watch launch, the lookbook cover for a heritage saree brand, the campaign visual that anchors a season’s paid media spend. Those still belong with a human retoucher.
Approach 3: Shoot-side prevention
The best glare removal is the kind you never have to do.
Cross-polarisation is the gold standard for shooting glossy products. A polarising filter on the light source plus a polarising filter on the lens — adjusted to perpendicular orientations — kills almost all surface reflections. Used widely in jewelry, watch, electronics, and polished-leather photography.
Bounce lighting reduces hotspots by softening the light source. A large softbox or scrim diffuses the studio overlight into a wider, less concentrated source. Hotspots become smooth gradients instead of pinpoint blowouts.
Polarising spray (yes, it exists) gives the product itself a temporary matte coating that absorbs reflection. Used widely in product photography for highly polished surfaces. Wipes off after the shoot.
These techniques work but require a real studio, real lighting kit, and real production time. For brands shipping catalog imagery at scale, the per-shot setup cost makes shoot-side prevention slower than AI-first cleanup for everything except hero campaign work.
Which approach fits which catalog
Apparel and fashion catalogs: AI-first. Glare is rare on most fabrics, and when it does appear (satin, sequins, metallics) the AI workflow handles it cleanly.
Jewelry catalogs: AI-first. The volume of macro work and the prevalence of hotspots makes any other approach uneconomical at scale.
Footwear catalogs: AI-first for mixed materials; shoot-side prevention for premium leather work where finish accuracy matters.
CPG and packaged goods: AI-first. Plastic wrap and glossy labels are predictable and well-handled by texture-aware reconstruction.
Editorial / lookbook / hero campaigns: Photoshop, paired with shoot-side prevention. The image volume is low; the per-image investment is justified.
Workflow integration
If you’re running AI glare removal at catalog scale, integrate it into your image pipeline at the point of ingestion. Vendor uploads, photographer drops, and historical catalog refreshes all benefit from a single automated cleanup step before anything hits the PDP or marketplace listing.
Kaptured.AI’s glare remover supports bulk uploads on the Software plan and managed bulk processing on Done-for-You. For brands processing thousands of SKUs, this turns a per-image QA task into a batch job that runs in the background while your team works on creative direction.
Related reading
- AI photo cleanup — broader cleanup including dust, fingerprints, and clutter
- AI photo enhancer — sharpness, contrast, and white balance after cleanup
- Jewelry photography category guide — full workflow for jewelry catalog production
- Glossary: packshot, ghost mannequin photography
Next steps
If you’re handling glare manually today, the fastest win is to run a free trial on AI-first removal against a representative sample of your catalog — 10 images covering your worst-case products. Compare the output to your current Photoshop pass. For 95% of brands, the per-image quality match makes the cost-and-speed difference impossible to ignore.
Start free on Kaptured.AI — three generations free, no credit card required.
