P: People Masking fails on Mac (Intel)

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​@sirthrosturv, ​@Hot Tubs Oxfordshire, there are many reports that People masking fails on Intel Macs with Mac OS 26.3, and the evidence strongly points at a buggy AMD graphics driver released in 26.3:

While waiting for Apple and AMD to release a fixed driver, try this workaround:

​@Hot Tubs Oxfordshire I intalled Mac OS Sequoia on an external drive (since it appears impossible to downgrade Tahoe) and people detection is no an issue when runnig Lightroom under that OS on the iMac.

That’s further evidence it’s a bug in the Mac OS 26.3 AMD graphics driver.

Are you using Lightroom (Lr icon) or Lightroom Classic (LrC icon)?

Please go to Help->System Info and provide all of the information shown there.

Hallo,

ich wollte heute mal wieder einige Bilder bearbeiten und wollte dabei auch die Masken benutzen. Normale Radiale/lineare oder Pinsel Masken funktionieren fehlerfrei. Möchte ich aber die Motiv/Himmel/Hintergrund Masken benutzen, lädt Lightroom kurz aber danach passiert nichts.

Das ist nun bei all meinen Bildern so, auch welche die schon vor Ewigkeiten importiert wurden oder auch welche die mit solchen Masken bereits mal bearbeitet wurden.

Hat jemand eine Idee was ich machen kann?
Windows und Grafiktreiber sind auf aktuellem Stand.

I have the same problem and also filed a bug report a month ago (which was subsequently downgraded to a “Question”)

Also suffering this  problem since upddating to Mac OS Tahoe on a 2020 iMac (3.3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5, 32GB RAM, with AMD Radeon Pro 5300 4 GB GPU) . It seems to be the case with Intel/AMD Macs only, as I also have a MacBook Pro M2 running Lightroom Classic on Tahoe that has no issue with finding peope in photographs.

Furthermore, I intalled Mac OS Sequoia on an external drive (since it appears impossible to downgrade Tahoe) and people detection is no an issue when runnig Lightroom under that OS on the iMac.

My conclusin is that, somehow, Tahoe has broken people detection in Lightroom Classic if running on Intel Macs with AMD GPUs.

Chris

System:

iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch (2020)

3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i7

AMD Radeon Pro 5500 XT (8 GB)

48 GB RAM

macOS Tahoe 26.3

Software:

Adobe Lightroom Classic (latest version)

Camera Raw 18.2

Problem:

In Develop → Masking, the command Select People always returns:

“No People Found”.

The message appears instantly and the masking panel closes. No person masks are created.

Other AI masking features work normally:

• Select Subject – works

• Select Sky – works

• Object Selection – works

• Portrait / Skin masks – work

Images tested:

The problem occurs with multiple image types:

• Leica M9 DNG

• Leica M10 DNG

• Leica Q2 DNG

• Leica Q3 DNG

• Canon 5D RAW

• iPhone JPEG portrait

Important observation:

The Camera Raw AI model for People detection does not appear to be installed.

Folder inspected:

~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/ModelZoo

Models are stored using hashed folder names and the file Index2.dat is present.

After deleting the entire ModelZoo folder, Lightroom rebuilds it and downloads models again, but Select People still does not work.

I find it strange that the header on Lightrooms main page Library/Develop still reads: Adobe Lightroom Classic - version 15.1 although I have upgraded to version 15.2.

Troubleshooting already performed:

• Lightroom Classic fully uninstalled and reinstalled

• Adobe Creative Cloud cleaned with Adobe Cleaner Tool

• Camera Raw model cache deleted (ModelZoo and Cache)

• macOS reinstalled (in-place reinstall)

• New Lightroom catalog created and tested

• New macOS user profile created and tested

• GPU acceleration tested ON and OFF

• Full Disk Access enabled for Lightroom

• ModelZoo rebuilt and Index2.dat regenerated

• Multiple image formats tested including iPhone JPEG

• Language set to English in Creative Cloud, Lightroom, and macOS

All other AI masking features continue to function normally.

Additional detail:

Lightroom System Info still reports the language setting as:

en-IS, even though English is selected in Creative Cloud and macOS.

Question:

Why would the People masking model not be installed or activated on this system, while other AI masking models work correctly?

Is there a way to force Lightroom Classic to download or reinstall the People segmentation model?

All the best

Throstur Vidisson

Has anyone yet tested if macOS 26.4 solves the issue?

(I'm not being offered the update yet)

A possible workaround to this People masking problem is to disable LR’s use of the GPU by its AI commands:

https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/kb/acr-gpu-faq.html#lens-blur

Note that the AI commands inexplicably ignore the setting of Preferences > Performance > Use Graphics Processor, so you can leave that setting at Auto, allowing other parts of LR to continue using the GPU. Also note that this workaround won’t affect Denoise, Adaptive Color, or Reflections (as of 1/10/26, when I last tested).

On my Macbook Pro (2023, M2 Max), this slows down People masking from an average of 1.1 seconds to 1.4 seconds. On my very wimpy ASUS mini-PC (Intel Core 3 1.2 GHz, 6 cores, integrated GPU), People masking slows down from about 5 seconds to 12 seconds.

I haven’t tested the other AI masking commands (e.g. Sky or Subject), but I expect the slowdowns will be similar.

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The evidence now more strongly points to a problem with the AMD graphics drivers introduced in Mac OS 26.3.0 (release on 2/11/26).  While we should hope and expect Adobe to be in contact with Apple developers providing technical details, it's up to Apple and AMD to provide fixed drivers.

Apple has released buggy AMD drivers affecting many LR users at least twice before, in 2023 and 2024, and each time it took Apple 5 months to release fixed drivers.

Details

Here's a summary of all the reports of People masking failing where users have provided System Info:

There are no reports prior to Mac OS 26.3.0. If the problem were not tied to Mac OS 26.3.0, but instead was something introduced by LR 15.2, we almost certainly would have seen at least a few reports on Mac OS 26.2, since many users defer updating Mac OS for weeks and months (I'm still on 26.2).

Further, user @Lalocakayak reported the problem started immediately after updating from Mac OS 15 to Mac OS 26.3.1 with LR 14.4.1.

Prior Incidents

- Starting 4/2/23 on Mac OS 13.3 (released 3/27/23), users of LR started reporting People masking failing with AMD 5700 and 5800 GPUs:

https://community.adobe.com/bug-reports-674/p-mac-people-masks-selections-are-not-as-expected-entire-screen-or-square-area-664047/index3.html?postid=664047#post664047

Many reported that Mac OS 14.0 (9/26/23) fixed the issue, though there were a few reports that the symptoms came back in 14.1 or 14.2.  There were no reports for Mac OS 14.3 or later.

- Starting 4/1/24 on Mac OS 14.4.1 (released 3/25/24), many Intel Mac LR users with AMD 500- and 5000-series GPUs started reporting strange image artifacts in rendered raws:

https://community.adobe.com/questions-675/p-gpu-develop-edit-view-export-artifacts-after-14-4-1-update-amd-only-affects-cr-lrc-lrd-981379/index3.html?postid=981379#post981379

Four weeks later, Adobe employee Rikk Flohr posted that it was an Apple/AMD problem:

https://community.adobe.com/questions-675/p-gpu-develop-edit-view-export-artifacts-after-14-4-1-update-amd-only-affects-cr-lrc-lrd-981379/index3.html?postid=4028115#post4028115

After Mac OS 15.0 was released 9/16/24, most users reported the problem was fixed.

Lightroom cannot detect people in the create new mask section. It scans and says “no people found.” It used to be great, but now it can’t do it at all. I have done the most recent updates to both LR and my iMac which has 3.3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5, graphics AMD Radeon Pro 5300 4 GB, with128 GB 2667 MHz DDR4.

Please let me know if there is a fix for this.