(Early Access) Assisted Culling (Lightroom Ecosystem - Desktop)

New Lightroom update, but still can’t remove the culling feature from the sidebar. I don’t need it. I don’t want it. Stop cluttering up my UI.

OK - I’m late to this. I heard about Assisted Culling a few months ago, but only had the opportunity to test it on a personal project photo session at a racetrack yesterday.

In the day, I took around 3.8k RAW photos of mainly auto racing tracking shots, but also some stationery vehicle photos. As is always the case, due to intentional slow shutter speeds (typically 1/60th to 1/100th) for maximum drama, there’s a high failure rate where the cars are not in focus.

I used Assisted Culling in Lightroom v9.2 (I don’t use Classic) on macOS. All images are locally stored, not synced to the cloud. On an M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 64GB, it took around 20 mins, which is fine. The photos are 8192 x 5464px, taken with a Canon R5.

Assisted Culling “approved” of around 450 photos where the focus target was set to a maximum of 90%. It was generally successful, with only a few blurred images slipping through.

Here’s an example of a photo (unedited) which was successfully selected:

Percentage-wise, the motion blurred background is much greater than the sharp subject. All good.

But then I checked the rejected images manually. Thankfully. I found that around 1,171 photos were all good (and I was being fussy), such as:

Worryingly, the photos which didn’t exhibit motion blur, but had a shallow depth of field were also rejected by Assisted Culling, such as:

Unfortunately, it’s not currently something I can rely on.

Are there any avenues for improvement? I don’t mind if it takes a little longer or requires the user to perhaps confirm approved selection from a sample it deems need questioning.

I would love the ability to set the point to look for focus accuracy. I am trying to get certain shots and it is detecting lack of focus on the wrong point

It would be great if the model could understand different photos/frames and sort them into categories. For example, I do photos of aircraft and would love it if it could sort the interior from the exterior.

Hi!

Would like to have eye (or head) focus selection also on animals. Being a nature photography the current culling is not very useful.

Train the AI more on animal and landscape photos.

The idea is excellent, but I believe that what's more important in the selection process is removing duplicate photos, photos that are similar. That would help much more than checking whether or not it was taken properly. That's my opinion.

Does. Not. Work. For example, this one is a reject because it is blurry. 

Hi, how can I switch off AI? It’s a crap, destroying my work. thanks

would love to use it but all it does is crash my computer. wasted hours trying to get it to work

Amazing concept. I wish it had worked, but my results were very poor. I tried both culling and stacking and both were poor. It selected misfires and missed terrific shots. It picked many shots with eyes closed after selecting eyes open.