Glasses are a portrait photographer’s recurring challenge. Those curved glass surfaces act as mirrors, reflecting your lights, your softbox shape, and sometimes your entire studio back at the camera. Every solution involves either preventing the reflection from forming, redirecting it away from the camera, or positioning the lights so the reflection falls outside the lens area.
Why Glasses Create Reflections
Glass reflects light at the same angle it receives it — the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. When a light source hits the lens surface at an angle that bounces directly into the camera lens, you see the reflection. Change any variable — light position, glasses angle, or camera position — and the reflection moves.
The Tilt Method
The simplest fix: have the subject tilt their glasses down very slightly — just 5-10 degrees. This redirects the reflection downward, out of the camera’s field of view.
How to do it: Ask the subject to tip the earpieces of their glasses up slightly on the back of their ears, or push the nose pads forward slightly. The front of the glasses tilts down. The change is invisible in the photograph but dramatically reduces reflections.
Limitation: This doesn’t work if the subject needs to look up or if the glasses have thick frames that make the tilt obvious.
Raise the Lights
The most reliable studio technique: raise your lights higher than normal. When lights are at standard portrait height (slightly above eye level), their reflection in glasses falls directly in the center of the lens — right over the subject’s eyes. Raising the light increases the reflection angle, pushing the reflection below the bottom rim of the glasses and out of view.
Practical height: Start with the light 2 feet above the subject’s head and angle it down. Check the glasses from the camera position — if you can still see the reflection, raise the light more.
Trade-off: Higher lights create deeper eye socket shadows. Compensate with a reflector below the face to fill the eye sockets, or accept the slightly more dramatic lighting pattern.
Move Lights to the Side
Reflections are most problematic when lights are near the camera axis (front-on). Moving the key light further to the side — to a 45-60 degree angle rather than 30-35 degrees — often pushes the reflection off the lens surface to one side.
Check each lens independently. Due to the curve of the face, the left lens and right lens may reflect the light at different angles. A position that eliminates the reflection in one lens may create one in the other. Finding the sweet spot requires micro-adjustments while looking through the camera.
Use Large, Diffused Sources
A small, point-source light creates a small, bright reflection — an obvious hot spot on the lens. A large, diffused source creates a larger, softer reflection that’s less objectionable. Sometimes you can’t eliminate the reflection entirely, but you can make it subtle enough to be acceptable.
A large softbox close to the subject produces a broad, diffused reflection that reads as a natural catchlight in the glasses rather than an obvious flash reflection. Some eyewear advertisements intentionally use this soft reflection as a design element.
The Black Card Technique
Place a black card directly in front of your light source, positioned so it blocks the reflected light path from the light to the glasses to the camera. The rest of the light continues past the card to illuminate the subject normally.
In practice: Cut a piece of black card slightly larger than the reflection you’re trying to block. Mount it on a stand between the light and the subject. Adjust its position while looking through the camera until the reflection disappears. The card needs to be large enough to block the reflection path but small enough that it doesn’t block significant light from the subject’s face.
This technique requires patience and precise positioning but works in situations where repositioning the main light isn’t an option.
Lighting Patterns That Help
Split lighting (light directly to the side) naturally avoids reflections because the light enters the glasses from the side, and the reflection exits to the opposite side — neither entering the camera lens.
Rembrandt lighting with the light relatively high and to the side works well with glasses for the same geometric reason — the reflection angle misses the camera.
Butterfly lighting can be problematic because the frontal position is exactly where reflections are worst. If you must use butterfly lighting on a glasses-wearing subject, raise the light higher than usual and tilt the glasses down.
Post-Processing Fixes
When you can’t avoid reflections entirely in-camera:
Clone stamp at low opacity. Sample from nearby skin or lens area and paint over the reflection. Use low opacity (20-30%) and build up gradually to match the surrounding tone.
Composite from multiple frames. Shoot two identical frames — one with the subject wearing glasses (for the overall portrait) and one without (for clean eyes). In Photoshop, mask the clean eye area from the no-glasses frame over the reflection area in the glasses frame.
Ask the subject to bring empty frames. If the subject owns frames without prescription lenses, or can temporarily remove their lenses, this eliminates reflections entirely. The frames look identical in the photograph but have no glass to reflect.
The Anti-Reflective Coating Factor
Modern prescription lenses with anti-reflective coatings produce dramatically fewer reflections than uncoated lenses. If your client is ordering new glasses before a portrait session, suggest anti-reflective coating. It won’t eliminate reflections entirely, but it reduces them by 80-90%.
Old or cheap glasses without coatings are the most challenging — every light source in the room appears as a distinct reflection on the lens surface. With these glasses, the tilt-and-raise technique becomes essential.