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

Hi, I have just tested the auto cull on photos from a recent motorcycle track day. The best results were from setting the subject focus at 70. Any higher than this resulted in many good images being rejected and I could not find any “keepers” in the rejects section. I never tried below the 70 setting. I will be using this again to speed up my post processing works.

For this to be 100% my first and only tool of choice, it would need to have a grouping tool. For instance, in each group on track there are between 25 & 40 riders. If there was an auto selection tool which grouped the individuals it would be perfect.

There are many other tools available which provide this service already but if it was available on lightroom and I could do all my work on a single platform then it would make my work process much simpler and quicker.

So in summary, my feedback is that it is a great tool and I look forward to future developments

functionality seems super rudimentary.  classic shot through a window showing the frame is called an exposure problem.  really?

this feature needs A LOT of work. it is basically unusable and untrustworthy. it puts perfectly focused images into the rejects bin more often than not. super frustrating

honestly i’m finding this feature incredibly frustrating. I’m trying to run assisted culling and bulk flag my selects, but continually it’ll only flag the first dozen before failing to continue. closing out of the feature sends me back to the beginning. 

As someone who is new to computers I found it confusing, I think its the sorting part...but this is only day 1 playing with it.

It would be nice to have a cull option for duplicate photos, instead of just the stack option for similar photos. 

the program crash after 70 photograph culled

Lightroom 9.3 ver - Mac platform

I had the same experience as ​@Nick Vee - also motorsport photos.

The speed and recognition of photos is neat, I placed a 75% of focused subject and out of 1600 photos I got 160 approved automatically. After manually checking the rejects, 315 more were appropriate.

(RAW) Rejected photo example: 

(RAW) Approved example:

Also tested with people, and the difference is abismal. Makes sense since faces are more recognisable s subjects. Looking forward to improvements! I already like this tool

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.