How to Use Assisted Culling in Lightroom Classic – Day 10

How to Use Assisted Culling in Lightroom Classic

Culling has always been the slowest, least interesting part of a shoot. Assisted Culling in Lightroom Classic takes the mechanical half of it — is the subject sharp, are the eyes sharp, are the eyes open — and answers it for every frame automatically, so the only decisions left are the ones that actually need your eye.

Below is the full workflow from the video: culling during import so the rejects never reach your drive, culling again in the Library module, and then narrowing a couple of hundred frames down to the two or three you would actually deliver.

What Assisted Culling Looks At

Assisted Culling detects faces and then scores three things independently:

• Subject in focus — how sharp the person is
• Eye focus — how sharp the eyes specifically are
• Eyes open — whether the subject blinked

Each frame gets a green check when it meets your criteria and a red X when it does not. Those three checks are the whole engine; everything else in this tutorial is deciding what to do with the answers.

Run It During Import

Drag your images into Lightroom Classic to open the import dialog. Assisted Culling sits at the top of the right-hand panel — click it and Lightroom analyses the whole take, which takes seconds rather than minutes.

Turn on Subject in focus and the green checks and red X marks appear immediately across the grid. Turn on eye focus and eyes open and the same pass covers blinks and soft eyes.

This is the part worth repeating: you are doing this before the files are copied. The frames that miss never take up space on your drive.

Reject the Frames That Should Never Come In

The same panel can reject whole categories of frames that have nothing to do with focus:

• Documents and receipts — the shots you took as notes, not photographs
• Misfires — the accidental frames every card has
• Exposure issues — anything wildly too bright or too dark

You will not always have all three on a given card, but leaving them switched on costs nothing and saves you from sorting through them later.

Auto-Stack Two Shoots Off One Card

If you shot more than one session before offloading, Auto-Stack can separate them for you. Stack by capture time and drag the time slider — as you shorten the gap, the grid resolves into distinct shoots, each collapsed behind a single thumbnail with a number on it. Click the number to open a stack.

You can also stack by visual similarity instead, which groups near-identical frames rather than frames taken close together.

Read the Scores, Then Set Your Own Threshold

Click any photo and Lightroom shows you the numbers behind the checkmark. One frame in the video scores 81 for subject focus and 90 for eye focus, with eyes marked as likely open. The next frame scores 49 for subject focus — the eyes are pin-sharp at 100, but the subject as a whole is softer than you would want.

Those thresholds are yours to move. Drag the subject-focus slider toward extremely sharp focus and frames that passed a moment ago pick up red X marks — the 81 no longer clears the bar. Drag it back to the left and you get a looser, more forgiving pass. Set it to match the job rather than accepting the default.

Choose What Actually Gets Imported

Assisted Culling marks frames; it does not decide for you. At the bottom of the import window, switch the view between Selects, Rejects and All:

• Switch to Rejects and click Uncheck All — those frames stay off your drive
• Switch back to All to see everything, checked and unchecked together
• Override anything by hand — uncheck a frame that passed, or re-check that 49 if you like the shot anyway

Then import. Only the checked frames are copied.

Cull Again in the Library Module

Assisted Culling is available in the Library module too, and this is where the second pass happens. Import decided what reaches your computer; the Library pass decides what your selects are.

Everything here carries a green check, which is expected — the red X frames were never imported. Open the stacking options and Auto-Stack by capture time again to separate the shoots, then click Stack.

You can also manage stacks by hand. Click the number on a stack to collapse or expand it, or go to Photo > Stacking for Unstack, Remove from Stack, Expand a Stack, Collapse All Stacks and Expand All Stacks.

Batch Actions: Flags, Ratings and Labels

Under the Eyes Open tab there is a Reject all can’t tell option for the frames the AI could not read. Use it, then double-click through those few yourself — sometimes the eyes clearly are open and the AI simply could not call it, and sometimes they are clearly closed.

Once the marks are right, open Organize Results > Batch Actions. Applying flags gives every selected frame a white flag (a pick) and every rejected frame a flag with a black X. The same dialog can apply a star rating, apply a color label, remove photos or add them to a collection.

As always, you can override afterwards — click any frame that was flagged wrongly and change it.

Filter Down, Then Compare in Survey View

If the filter bar is hidden, go to View > Show Filter Bar or press the / key above Return. The Library Filter offers Text, Attribute, Metadata and None; choose Attribute to filter by flag or by reject.

Filter to your flagged picks, shift-click a run of frames from one shoot, and press N for Survey view. In Survey you hold Control or Command and click the X on a frame to drop it from the comparison, working down until one image is left. Press 5 to give it five stars.

Two shortcuts make this much easier: Shift + Tab hides every panel so the photos fill the screen, and pressing it again brings them back.

Repeat for the second shoot, then filter by five stars and put both winners in Survey view side by side. From a card of several hundred frames, that is two images — and you know without checking that both subjects are sharp, their eyes are sharp, and their eyes are open, because those were your criteria from the moment the files came off the card.

What This Changes About Culling

Assisted Culling does not choose your photographs. What it removes is the tedious half of the job — checking hundreds of frames for focus and blinks one at a time — and it front-loads that check to import, so your drive only ever holds frames that were worth keeping.

What is left is the part that needs a photographer: which expression, which light, which frame you would actually put your name on.

Try It on Your Next Shoot

Download the sample images below and run the whole process end to end — import with Assisted Culling on, auto-stack the two shoots, batch-apply flags, then survey down to a single five-star frame from each. It takes a few minutes, and it is the fastest way to see how much of your culling time this gives back.

Quick Reference: Keys, Menus and Settings

• Cull on importImport window > Assisted Culling: Subject in focus, Eye focus, Eyes open
• Keep rejects off the driveView: Rejects, Uncheck All, then Import
• Separate the shootsAuto-Stack by capture time; Photo > Stacking to expand or collapse
• Flag picks and rejectsOrganize Results > Batch Actions > apply flags
• Filter barView > Show Filter Bar or \, then Attribute
• Compare and rateN for Survey view, click the X to drop a frame, 5 for five stars
• Hide the panelsShift + Tab