Lens flare is one of those problems that can ruin an otherwise great shot, and the usual fixes in Lightroom take time and skill. A trick circulating in the landscape photography community suggests using Lightroom's reflection removal tool, originally designed for shooting through glass, to clean up lens flares instead.
Coming to you from Michael Rung Photography, this revealing video puts Lightroom Classic's reflection removal tool through a real-world test across multiple landscape images, including shots from Grand Teton National Park and Yosemite. Rung picked up the idea from a post in the Landscape Photographers Worldwide Discord server and decided to see how the tool actually performs on flare-heavy raw files. On a 2018 Grand Teton shot with a strong flare blob in the lower-left corner, the tool clears it up in under 10 seconds on an M4 Max MacBook Pro at standard quality, which Rung grades as a C+. A second image with a more complex set of flares spread across the lower portion of the frame earns an A, with only a minor remnant that any standard removal tool could handle in seconds.
The Yosemite shots tell a different story. Three of the four images fail to get meaningful flare removal on the most obvious problem areas, with the tool either ignoring the main flare entirely or only addressing faint, secondary haze around the edges. Rung is straightforward about it: some of these are essentially fails. That said, the video doesn't end on a down note, because one of those Yosemite shots produces something nobody in the Discord had apparently thought to test.
That final image came from Bridal Veil Falls, where mist and spray left water droplets across a significant portion of the lens. Rung wasn't expecting much when he applied the reflection removal tool, but the results stop him mid-sentence. The tool clears the droplets with a thoroughness that goes well beyond what anyone would reasonably expect from a feature built for window glare. It's the kind of result that reframes what this tool is actually useful for, at least for outdoor and nature work. Rung also runs a direct quality comparison between standard and best processing settings on this same image. At standard quality, foliage loses sharpness in a way that's hard to ignore. At best quality, the sharpness holds up against the original raw data, which is a meaningful finding if you've been avoiding this tool over quality concerns.
The video covers which images worked, which didn't, and exactly how the quality settings affect the final output, including the first live test Rung runs on camera with no idea what the result will be. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Rung.
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