Canon has announced it will soon be releasing a new AI-powered plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic that will be able to cull through images and sort them based on image quality.

The plug-in smartly doesn’t attempt to judge a photograph’s artistic merits, but instead looks at an image’s technical aspects, assisting photographers with choosing the best shot out of a series of similar images. The algorithm will compare sharpness — something that’s difficult to judge in the tiny previews in the Lightroom library — as well as aspects like noise, exposure, and contrast. The plug-in will also not recommend photos with closed eyes or red eyes.

Analyzed images are tagged with colored flags within the Library tab of Lightroom, so they will have the same feel and look as Lightroom’s existing image selection tools. Canon says that photographers will be able to control the settings before culling to customize the results.

You’ll need an Adobe Lightroom Classic subscription to use it, and the app itself will be available exclusively on the Adobe Exchange App Marketplace for a monthly subscription, the price of which Canon hasn’t announced yet.
Many photographers use the likes of Photo Mechanic to import photos to Lightroom due to its speedy handling of Raw files, but Canon’s Photo Culling app certainly sounds like it has potential for those who want to edit as quickly as possible within Lightroom Classic itself.

Canon has recently closed its Irista cloud-based image storage service, so it is interesting to see that it has other software based products up its sleeve. At the show, Canon also demonstrated Image Connect, a platform that helps customers find professional photographers for family portraits.

More info on Canon’s website.