May 2022.
Pittsboro, North Carolina.

Note: We will be offline during much of the week this post is published. I apologize if I don’t respond quickly to any comments or questions you may have for me.

In 2022, we visited the Carolina Tiger Rescue. For years, the rescue facility was operated by a dedicated veterinarian. After he passed away, a nonprofit sanctuary took over the responsibility for caring for these wild cats. In October 2022, I shared the stories of some residents from the rescue facility in a previous post here.

What brought me to revisit the photos is a YouTube video from Anthony Morganti. In September, he demonstrated a method for using the recently added Reflections Removal Tool in Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw. For reflections, I’ve found the tool to be hit-and-miss, but it appears to be useful in situations I never imagined, such as removing chain-link fence lines in front of the subject. You can view his YouTube video here.

In 2022, when I first published the photos, I mentioned why the chain-link fences are such a problem. With many zoo exhibits around the country, a single fence or plexiglass shield protects visitors from the animals (and vice versa). I’ve learned that if the animal is far from the fence toward the back of the enclosure, choosing a larger lens opening and focusing on the subject makes the fence all but disappear. At the Carolina Tiger Rescue, the animals are housed in chain-link fence enclosures, and a second fence creates a protective “no-man’s land” between the animal enclosure and the viewing area. The safety device prevents the trick of shallow focus from working. All of my photos in that article featured a chain-link fence between the camera and the animal.

As you can see by the opening image and the original photo, running the Reflection Removal Tool in Lightroom Classic left only the slightest indication that a fence might be between me and the resting tiger.

In the original image below, you might notice that in both cases, the fence overlaying the picture is quite out of focus. Those images have the best chance of minimizing the fence pattern. After the foreground fence was removed, I could see the pattern of the fence behind the cougar through some of the plants. I used Generative Fill in Adobe Photoshop to mask and generate a replacement background for the area above and to the right of the cougar’s head.

The tool, however, isn’t perfect for this function by any means. If the fence is too sharply focused, the reflection tool doesn’t see the fence as a reflection, but as part of the photo. Below are two images, one with and one without correction, to illustrate the problem.

In this example of the tiger, also featured in the opening photo, dark gray lines are visible in part of the image. If I wanted to truly rescue this image, I could also apply generative fill to remove the remaining distractions.

If you compare this original photo with the original of the tiger in the opening series, you can see that this fence is more in focus than the first photo. I gave up trying to remove the fence from images where the fence is more sharply defined than this one.

Still, it might be worth a try to run reflection removal. The fence in the photo above is certainly less distracting than the fence in the original image.

The best results are achieved when the fence is as out of focus as possible. If you’re planning a trip to the zoo and attempting to take a photo through a fence, try to make the fence as blurry as possible for the best results.

When it comes to reflections on plexiglass and glass surfaces, I’ve had mixed results as well, but sometimes the results are excellent. One thing I learned early on is that taking a photo from an angle can reduce reflections. It seems, however, that those reflections that remain are more complex for the AI tool to remove. It appears that the AI considers the reflection to be part of the subject. For a closer look at the images in 2K HD, they are all posted on a Flickr gallery here.

John Steiner