Getting Started with the Culling Tab

The Culling Tab

The Culling tab contains the functions and controls to speed up your culling process. It interacts with the Library mode of Lightroom. To use it, import your photos into Lightroom.
Note: Make sure your source in Lightroom is set to the folder that contains the photos, not a collection or search results.

The Culling process starts with analyzing your photos to find duplicate photos, as well as photos that have closed or blurry eyes.

Photos are grouped after culling into these categories:

• Filtered — Unique photos that do not have any eyes closed or are blurry.
• Duplicates — These are photos that have duplicates or visually similar photos. These are common as photographers will capture a series of similar photos to get the best expression and focus.
• Eyes Closed — These are photos where at least one eye is detected as being closed.
• Blurry — These are photos where they might be detected as out of focus.  Blurry is hidden by default.  Enable it in Culling Preferences if desired.

Each category will have metadata assigned to it automatically. In Lightroom you can change the metadata to move photos between the categories.

The Selects category is user-managed.  You can group images into it by setting their rating to 5 stars (this is the default but can be made whatever you like).  The Selects group is useful for holding your top images.

Culling Preferences

Before pressing Analyze the first time, check your preferences in Lightpanel to configure how you want metadata assigned to the automatically created categories for Selects, Duplicates, Eyes-Closed, and Blurred. You can adapt Lightpanel to assign any combination of stars, color labels, or flags based on your existing workflow.

Generally, photographers use low star ratings for problem photos and higher ratings for better photos. By default Lightpanel uses Four stars for Filtered, three stars for Duplicates, two stars for Eyes Closed, and one star for Blurry, leaving five stars available for your favorites and the Selects group.

In the Culling Defaults section you can adjust the defaults for the culling pane. These can also be set in the Culling pane before you press the Analyze button. You can also disable the classification of Eyes Closed and Blurry if you do not wish to use these features.  The Analyze drop down allows you to pick between Deep and Quick analysis options.  Deep prepares more functions in advance while Quick is on-demand.