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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
September 24, 2025
Question

(Early Access) Assisted Culling (LrClassic)

  • September 24, 2025
  • 63 replies
  • 129063 views

Introducing Assisted Culling (Early Access) in Lightroom Classic. 

For providing feedback for Lightroom Desktop, click here

 

TL;DR – Assisted Culling is getting faster, more powerful, and more accurate as we head to GA. If you tried in October 2025, we urge you to try the new version and give us feedback – especially for wedding & portrait photographers. We’re eager to hear your feedback! 

 

Assisted Culling has received several updates since Early Access launched in October 2025. If you tried it then, here's what's new: 

 

April 2026 

  • Significantly improved handling of shallow depth-of-field for photos – a major customer ask. Images with intentional background blur are now more reliably recognized and kept rather than rejected as out-of-focus. 

  • We’ve retrained the “Reject model” so it has more accurate identification of reject-worthy images. Additionally, an image can now be flagged under multiple reject reasons simultaneously: 

  • Exposure Issues: includes a sensitivity slider so you can control the threshold 

  • Documents 

  • Misfires: ground shots and severe blur 

February 2026 

  • Expanded support from individual portraits to multi-person scenes, including weddings, events, and group photos. 

  • Improved eye detection accuracy in dense group and wedding scenes 

  • Cleaner subject separation when multiple people are close together 

  • Fewer false "eyes closed" results on groups and portraits 

FAQs:

 

Q: Where is Assisted Culling available? 
A: Lightroom Desktop and Lightroom Classic. 

 

Q: What kinds of photos work best today? 
A: Individual portraits and multi-person scenes, including weddings, events, and group photos.

 

Q: Can I adjust how strict the culling is? 
A: Yes. Each criterion can be toggled on or off, and Subject Focus, Eye Focus, and Exposure Issues include sensitivity sliders for finer control. 

 

Q: Do I need to pay extra? 
A: No. Assisted Culling is included in your existing Lightroom subscription. 

 

Feedback: 

Please share your experience in this thread. Include: 

  • App version/platform 
  • System details 
  • Example images (optional) 

Kwamina Arthur, Product Manager, Lightroom 

63 replies

Mojopagoda
Participant
May 11, 2026

Is there a way to turn it off: it always causes my LrC to crash out. I have c. 80,000 photos and don’t need this to happen every single time I use LrC.

aStaden
Participant
May 2, 2026

When you support bird photography better, I would like an option to reject photos where the subject (the bird) isn’t completely in the frame. If a wing or feet are clipped, reject it.

walterleonard
Participant
May 1, 2026

Cool. But can you add a feature for styles or like for example I do fashion shots and it would be great to have it select best poses. Or custom train model so the user can train it to their workflow or style. Some times it work but some times I did my shots so well that it don't do anything like just one picture was rejected. And the settings for sharpness its too extreme needs an in between  (light medium hard).  Other thing that would be great is the repetitive cropping specially for dynamic shots. Make he ai detect where the subject is then evaluate and leave margins as the user specified use golden ratio and finish the batch. 

Inspiring
April 21, 2026

Currently running a test on a group of 41k portraits.  Seems to be working slowly but working, one item I have noticed is that the system is choosing sun glasses as in focus eyes.  It would be ideal if the system would be able to select out sunglasses vs in focus eyes.  Running on MacBook Air M2 24Gb Ram

Known Participant
April 21, 2026

Hopefully we can use this for animals (birds would be great). 

TorrKirb
Participant
April 17, 2026

I appreciate the tool and love what it can do for me for bigger shoots and extensive catalogs. The slider improvements help, and I think Adobe can make it better by adding a couple of new features that the competitors include, ie keyword search features and adaptations that remind me of Adobe Bridge’s categorization features. Still working through it all, will report back. 

Known Participant
April 4, 2026

Lightroom refuses to turn off culling which crashes every time

garyobrien321
Participant
March 31, 2026

I need to turn this feature off and keep it off. I don’t want it operating without my activating it.

Corey Ward
Participant
March 21, 2026

Tried this for the first time yesterday and it did okay. It’s quite quick, and the ability to filter by approved or rejected, and to adjust standards on the fly is very convenient. I appreciate having it in its current form to help with an initial quick pass to reject the obvious “no” photos.

It struggles with some things that I think are viable to improve, though. Here are some thoughts I had when using it.
 

Show Aggregate Counts in Range Pickers

The sliders for subject focus and eye focus would be more helpful if they had some visual indication of where the values of the current selection lie. For example, a histogram range slider like is commonly seen in faceted search scenarios where the values indicated by the histogram are derived from the quantity of photos within each bucket. 

This lets me as a user quickly get a sense for how sharpness is distributed across the set, and therefore what value to choose as my divider between what I'm accepting and rejecting.

Contextual Rejection

Standards for rejection vary based on the options when a human is doing the culling. If there are many properly exposed options for a given composition, improperly exposed options are easy to reject. If all of the options in a composition are improperly exposed, I may try to make one of them work rather than rejecting them all outright. The current Assisted Culling doesn’t seem to have any mechanism for dynamic standards based on similarity despite automated stacking.

“Exposure Issues” 

In its current form, the exposure issue detection is either too sensitive or lacks awareness of the image content. It tends to flag photos of someone in dark clothing with moody shadows (where the skin is properly exposed) as underexposed, likely due to the histogram being heavy on darker values. Being able to tune that sensitivity with a slider like we can for sharpness might be enough to make the current heuristic more usable. Otherwise, a vision-capable model that can determine either the most relevant areas to consider for exposure or that can spit out a target EV for the photo may be worthwhile.

Inconsistent evaluation of near identical images

I have two frames that were taken of the same subject in studio that are exposed identically and use the same focus point, but where the subject is positioned about 5% further away from the center. For one, eyes were detected and the subject focus score is 36. For the other, no eyes are detected and the subject focus score is 64.

Thank you!

ShootingPixelsAndy
Inspiring
March 18, 2026

Quick question. Is there a way to get the assisted culling to run over the images again and re-score them from scratch?