Canon Photo Culling app will automatically weed out your duff shots

Canon Photo Culling app
(Image credit: Canon)

Canon is releasing a piece of software that will take the strain out of finding the best frames from a portrait or wedding shoot. Not content with just announcing the details of the flagship Canon EOS 1-D X Mark III at the CES 2020, it has also revealed a clever-sounds in app called Photo Culling.

The idea of this bit of software is that it works within Adobe Lightroom Classic as a plugin, and will take the strain of picking the best shot from a shoot. Powered by what Canon is calling its Computer Vision AI engine, the Photo Culling app promises "to save photographers countless hours in post-production by using technical models to cull for image sharpness, noise, exposure, contrast, closed eyes, and red eyes". 

(Image credit: Canon)

Analyzed images are tagged with colored flags within the Library tab of Lightroom, so will have the same feel and look as Lightroom's existing image selection tools. The photographer also has the ability to customize the settings – so you have some control over the images that the app rejects. 

The Photo Culling plug-in will be available exclusively on the Adobe Exchange App Marketplace from February. Users will be expected to pay a monthly fee for this service, and although the cost has yet to be announced it is likely to be a facility that is best suited to professional users that have lots of similar shots to sift through - such as with group shots at a wedding.

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.

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Chris George

Chris George has worked on Digital Camera World since its launch in 2017. He has been writing about photography, mobile phones, video making and technology for over 30 years – and has edited numerous magazines including PhotoPlus, N-Photo, Digital Camera, Video Camera, and Professional Photography. 

His first serious camera was the iconic Olympus OM10, with which he won the title of Young Photographer of the Year - long before the advent of autofocus and memory cards. Today he uses a Nikon D800, a Fujifilm X-T1, a Sony A7, and his iPhone 15 Pro Max.

He has written about technology for countless publications and websites including The Sunday Times Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, Dorling Kindersley, What Cellphone, T3 and Techradar.