How to handle water reflections and overexposed images

[der_luftmensch]

@laravel988

d to slighty smooth the image to remove high frequency noise/not relevant details using Gaussian filter, and then to use CLAHE in the Y component of YUV color space and also in the Luminance channel of Lab space, trying several parameters but seems not to work. The reflections are not reduced so much and also the constract

Use raw data if you can, the artefacts on the water are due to compression. Also, you could try a polarized light filter over the camera lens to reduce the glare.