Remove Glasses Glare

Removing glare from glasses in a photo means taking the bright reflection off the lens so the eye behind it shows clearly again, while keeping the frame and the glass. In this example, a woman of about 62 holds a bouquet and a card at her retirement send-off in the office meeting room. Light from the window has left a milky, see-through reflection of the window panes across her left lens. Her eye is still there under it, but washed out and pale, and it is the first thing anyone sees in the photo her family wants to keep.

What changed in this photo, and what stayed the same?

• Removed: the milky window reflection across the left lens, including the faint lines of the window panes.
• Kept: the eye behind it exactly as it shows through the reflection: its shape, the eyelids, both corners and where she is looking. Nothing in the eye is redrawn or guessed.
• Kept: the glasses frames and the other lens, her smile and her other eye, the cardigan, the flowers and card, and the meeting room behind her. Only the lens area was edited.

Can glare that covers the whole eye be removed too?

Here the reflection is see-through: the eye is still in the photo, so the edit only takes away the bright layer on top of it. When a solid white patch hides part of the eye, nothing of that part survives in the photo, and the eye can only be rebuilt from another photo of the same person; even then it is a reconstruction, not her real eye. If you have a second shot from the same moment, send it; if not, we will tell you before starting. If the eye is rebuilt from that second shot, it counts as a photo to edit too, so 1 more credit. A photo we only look at is free.

Why keep the glasses instead of removing them?

She wears glasses every day, and her colleagues and family know her with them on. Taking out the reflection keeps the photo true to how she looks; removing the glasses entirely changes her face.

What should you send?

• The original photo in full resolution.
• Another photo from the same moment, if the glare covers most of the eye. It is the only reliable source for an eye the glare has hidden.
• A note on which person to fix if it is a group photo.

For eyes lost in shadow rather than glare, see brighten eyes in a dark photo. For red flash eyes, see remove red eye from photos. More edits are under face and skin retouching.

Private: recreated on our own images, not customer photos

The before/after shown here is recreated on images created or licensed for this site — never a real customer's photo. Your upload is seen only by the editor working on it, and the edit comes with free revisions within 14 days of delivery if anything needs adjusting.