Lightroom Classic 15.0 adds Assisted Culling that uses AI to find sharp, usable frames fast. If you shoot people, sorting by “eye focus” and “eyes open” cuts wasted time and keeps soft poses from sneaking into client picks.
Coming to you from Terry Vander Heiden, this hands-on video shows how Assisted Culling lives in Library mode under an Early Access panel with a confidence slider. You set Subject Focus or Eye Focus, then raise the threshold until weak frames turn red and fall away. In the demo, a 100-image portrait set drops to 51 selects once eye sharpness is prioritized. You also see checkboxes to reject “can’t tell” cases and closed eyes. The tool doesn’t alter files, it only marks and sorts.
You’re shown how to act on the results without manual busywork. Batch actions let you flag, rate, color label, or add the selects to a new collection in one step. Auto Stacking by visual similarity groups near-duplicates so you choose two or three variations instead of clicking through 20 of the same pose. That speeds headshots, seniors, and family sessions where expression and micro-changes matter. Early access means you should expect a few quirks, however.
Vander Heiden pushes on limits so you don’t waste time testing the obvious. Birds break the Eyes Open test because the model looks for human eyes. Mammals are inconsistent at this stage, so keep the feature focused on people work. Inside people sessions, Eye Focus is the smarter first pass than general subject sharpness, because a perfect pose with a soft eye never survives client review. You keep creative judgment while letting the software clear clear misses.
You get a practical import angle that helps storage management. Turn on Assisted Culling at import, set Eye Focus high, enable rejects for misfires and clear exposure outliers, and only bring in selects. When a 1,000-shot job produces 100 keepers, importing the keepers alone reduces catalog bulk and saves disk space. Calibrate on existing collections first so your threshold fits your shooting style. Once you trust it, mirror those settings during import to keep new projects lean.
Keyboard-driven refining remains available after Assisted Culling. You can view only selects, flag everything at once, and park the results in a “best” collection for client previews. Auto Stacking then groups similar poses so you compare a few on screen and knock out odd expressions with a quick reject. That leaves a tighter, cleaner set ready for editing without second-guessing whether you missed a sharper frame two rows back.
The video avoids hype and sticks to actions that save time in a portrait workflow. You see what to toggle, how far to push the slider before good frames vanish, and where the tool still stumbles with animals. You also learn a simple habit: train on a small set, then apply the same parameters during import to stay consistent across jobs. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Vander Heiden.
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