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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
Rikk Flohr_PhotographyCommunity Manager
September 24, 2025
Question

(Early Access) Assisted Culling (LrClassic)

  • September 24, 2025
  • 60 replies
  • 116048 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 

    60 replies

    Show previous replies
    W
    willp2
    Participant
    February 25, 2026

    Have run this on thousands of photos, but it never finds the subject much less the eyes.  This needs alot of work.  It’s basically useless for my purposes.

      K
      kasparss95237364
      Participating Frequently
      February 20, 2026

      Just updated to Lightroom Classic 15.2 and tried the "improved" AI-assisted culling. After running an entire studio photoshoot through it, my opinion hasn't changed since the last version - this feature is a total joke.

      I shot a session on a Sony A1 at f/5.6, where 95% of the frames are tack sharp. Looking at the results, it feels like the AI is just generating random numbers instead of actually scanning the images for sharpness or detail. For example, in a series of nearly identical shots, the one where I clearly missed focus got a 95% score, while the perfectly sharp ones were rated under 90%.

      I don't understand why Adobe is wasting time and resources on a "feature" that performs like a toy. It's completely unreliable for professional work. They should focus on improving actual AI editing models or performance instead of this.

      Is anyone actually finding this useful for real-world sessions, or is it just a useless gimmick?

      oldpiefke
      oldpiefke
      Known Participant
      March 10, 2026

      it seems from the current set-up a joke looking to on market available functionality of other tool, but might be ADOBE is really learning from feedback as usually. 

       

        LyseCandle
        LyseCandle
        Participant
        February 12, 2026

        It’s working out fairly well but one thing that is happening is if I go into loupe on a photo and then go back into grid mode, that photo will disappear from the filter of possible rejects and it takes resetting the Assisted Culling filter to get it back on the list.

        C
        casual_wisdom16B8
        Participating Frequently
        February 9, 2026

        I would like a culling that removes duplicates.

          V
          vonderfoto
          Participant
          February 2, 2026

          In my scenario it doesn’t work as expected:
          The lightroom imported all the rejected photos and didn’t mark them as Rejected!

          So all the work that I did, adjusting the settings - was just a waste…

          The idea is good, and some competitors already doing it properly.

           

          • App version/platform 

          Lightroom Classic version: 15.1
          Operating system: Windows 11

          • System details 

          Intel Core i9-14900KF

          48.0 GB RAM

          nVidia 3080

          Wise.Otter
          Wise.Otter
          Participant
          January 27, 2026

          I have had a horrible time trying to get Assisted Culling to work.  No matter what the photos, or catalog, the photos are analyzed, and assisted culling reads no results.  “0 selects”, “0 rejects”, and no Culling Scores.  

          -Tried in LrC 15.1.1, AND in 15.0; with same result…….

          -MacBook Pro Sequoia 15.7.3, 16GB 2133MHz

          -In the ‘Catalog Settings’, both ‘Assisted Culling’ boxes are checked.

          -Yes, the Assisted Culling boxes for subject & eye focus are checked.  I have moved the sliders all the way and still no culling happens.  

           

          -I spent 3 full mornings trying to rectify it and then had Adobe Chat Help takeover the computer to try things for over an hour and they couldn’t figure it out either.  They eventually said to post this here.  

           

          Really hope this gets remedied I really only got the Adobe package for a culling feature.  

           

          *****Edit: I have installed Lightroom (not classic) and culling seems to be working there.  

          But I really don’t like this Lightroom option; it is much slower I find and I prefer everything about LrC.  Still hoping for a solution on LrC.

           

          E
          Enrico Frascati
          Participant
          November 19, 2025

          I often shoot photo sessions for a finance magazine, and many of them are interviews with industry professionals. To make the shots more dynamic, I try to create different focus planes, for example by using the cinematic “over the shoulder” technique, keeping the journalist in the foreground out of focus and seen from behind.

          However, LR’s new culling feature rejects these images as blurry, I guess because it treats the journalist as a subject of the photo as well. I think this is something that should be fixed.

          Apart from that, it seems like a good result to me, considering this is the very first release.

            R
            romantic_observer9608
            Participant
            November 16, 2025

            Hi,
            the Feedback-button isn't available for me.
            It works well for me, I'd prefer if it rejected any images where anyone has their eyes closed instead of everyone.

            J
            Joe U
            Participating Frequently
            November 15, 2025

            TL;DR

            Lightroom’s Subject Detection groups all detected people as one subject regardless of where they are in the focal plane, creating inaccurate focus analysis in Assisted Culling. 

            ---

            Hey Rikk & Adobe Team,

             

            First of all, thank you all for the effort in bringing Assited Culling to LrC. Any time a new feature arrives with the potential benefit of spending less time editing and more time living, I am grateful!

             

            That said, I want to provide my insight on this as a full time corporate event photographer. In my testing (albeit limited) the issue I'm facing with Assisted Culling actually stems from the issues I have with the way Subject & Background detection are implemented in Lightroom. 

             

            The primary issue is that I think Lightroom does a very poor job of identifying the actual “subject” of a photo, at least given my understanding of what a subject should be, which is the focal point of an image. 

             

            See Attached Example

             

            Instead, the “Select Subject” feature seems to select anything that it can also identify as “People”, and then merges them into a single mask and calls it the subject. 

             

            This presents a big hurdle when it comes to masking and attempting to make the actual subject pop because it includes all of these other people that aren’t the subject.

             

            Where this screws up Assisted Culling is that when it analyzes the “subjects”, it appears to be taking the average focus of that entire selection and giving it a score based on that. (I’m working off assumptions here, but this seems like what is happening).

             

            As you can see in my example, the gentleman in the front is very obviously the subject in the traditional sense and is completely in focus, yet Assisted Culling gave this photo a subject score of 43. Harsh!

             

            There’s honestly not much else to say about it. This kind of implementation makes it pretty useless for anything except portrait photography. Maybe that was the idea, or maybe it’s just early version blues, but I wanted to at least offer my perspective!

             

            I’m very invested in something like this working because I really hate culling! Happy to discuss additional thoughts and details if that would be beneficial at all.

             

            Thanks for reading!

            J
            Joe U
            Participating Frequently
            November 15, 2025

            I am not able to edit my previous comment, but I admittedly didn't read the entire thread and just noticed that @Rikk Flohr: Photography addressed this feature being geared toward portrait photography in a previous reply.  I still think my perspective on Subject Detection applies.

             

            Also my attachment didn't work and I've added it here.

            Feel free to merge my posts, I don't know why you can't edit them.

             

            E
            Emes Production
            Participant
            November 12, 2025

            So to be honest, i got super excited that this feature came out which would save my team a nice work load - However, im now noticing as its written: its more focusing on wildlife and landscapes vs Events. 

             

            Imagine trying to cull down 1500 images into 500 or less, it should have the ability to cull 2-3 shots per image, detect the extras and dump them, and if for what ever reason there was bad lighting, a missfire or not super sharp image and its the only 1 of that type, should we add it to your gallery:) cant wait for "that" update

              D
              defaultzdb1tde3wl8e
              Participating Frequently
              November 12, 2025

              You are sadly mistaken, read what it says in the article, it specifically states its for events and weddings, it doesn't work on landscapre & wildlife photos whatsoever, which is a lot of peoples complaints.

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