Adobe Firefly tests 3 reflection behaviors across puddles, mirrors, and glass

• Glenn Williams’ Firefly breakdown says the same “impossible reflection” idea produced three different image logics depending on surface: puddles behaved like reflections, mirrors behaved more like composites, and glass read more like a portal thread article.
• In Williams’ tests, puddles were the most reliable route to physically legible surrealism because Firefly rendered the reflected world upside down and with sharper reflection cues, according to his write-up.
• Williams also shared a reusable puddle prompt template for Firefly Image 5 and Nano Banana 2 that locks in low-angle framing, wet ground, and a clearly specified impossible scene inside the reflection prompt share.
• A supporting remix suggests the recipe can travel beyond Firefly: a reposted test using Grok kept the same puddle-first composition and still delivered a strong surreal contrast between the street scene and the reflected world Grok test.

Williams’ article is less a gallery than a workflow finding: surface choice is doing structural work in the image. In his Firefly tests, puddles triggered an inverted reflection logic, which made the impossible scene feel grounded by normal photographic rules; mirrors instead flattened the alternate world into something closer to a backdrop; and glass surfaces acted more like openings into another place than reflective objects article summary.

That matters because the same surreal concept does not survive every surface equally well. If you want the model to preserve the sensation of “this impossible world is really being reflected here,” puddles gave the cleanest result in Williams’ examples, while mirrors weakened the illusion by losing reflection physics.

Williams’ shared template bakes in the conditions that helped the effect land: a subject standing on wet ground at night, a low camera placed near the surface, a puddle at the subject’s feet, and an impossible scene described in specific visual detail instead of generic fantasy language. The prompt also specifies how the reflected scene should cast colored light back onto the wet ground, plus 35mm street photography, deep focus, and cinematic lighting prompt share.

The attached examples show why that wording works. A cellist on rainy steps gets a purple crystal landscape in the puddle, a bride gets a shipwreck reef, and a ballerina gets an erupting volcano

. Even the supporting Grok remix kept the core pattern: ordinary monochrome street above, impossible color world below Grok remix.