LIGHTROOM CC (LIGHTROOM 6)
FACIAL RECOGNITION
By: Kathy Leary
A new version of Lightroom was released late in April.
One of the new functions with this release is facial
recognition, which is the focus of this article and can be
useful whether you’re a professional photographer or if
you just want to organize family photographs.
When in library mode, you can select a drive, a folder or
a sub-folder to begin the process of identifying faces in
your pictures. Lightroom will start searching for faces
in the folder that you’ve selected once you select People
from the View drop down menu or if you’re in Library
mode there is now a new face icon above the left side
of the film strip as illustrated below. This can be a slow
process, so I recommend that you start out with a small
number of pictures until you get a feel for the pace.
or drag and drop the picture onto the correct stack above.
If you double click on one of the faces the picture will
open up. Sometimes is easier to make an identification
that way. Once you have identified all the faces that
Lightroom finds it’s a good idea to review the pictures
in your folder to check for faces that Lightroom missed.
Lightroom seems to have a hard time identifying profiles
and sometimes finds things that aren’t faces at all. When
in review mode you can draw a box around faces that were
missed or reject the ones that aren’t faces.
Now we get to the part we’ve been waiting for, how to
retrieve the photographs you’re looking for using this
new tool. Still working in Library mode, using the column
on the right side of the screen open up keyword list by
clicking on the arrow at the right of that word. Click the
arrow beside Filter Keywords and click on People. Now
you will see a list of all the people that you previously
identified on your pictures.
As Lightroom finds faces they are displayed on the screen.
If Lightroom thinks there are two pictures of the same
face they will be stacked on top of each other underneath
a title “Unnamed People”. As you start naming them the
pictures move to a new section called “Named People”.
After you’ve identified a person Lightroom will suggest
that name for other pictures where a match is found.
Now you can drag and drop the unnamed faces onto the
named face or click the check mark to the left of the
name to move a picture into the named section. If the
suggested name is incorrect just type the correct name
Hover over the name of the person
that you’re looking for and an arrow
will appear to the right of the number of pictures identified for that
person. Click on the arrow and those
pictures will be displayed in the film
strip at the bottom of the screen. By
clicking on the face icon at the bottom of the screen you can turn the
names on and off on your pictures
This new process really speaks to the organizer in me. I
hope you find it as helpful as I have. Enjoy!!
NM CliQ Magazine | June 2015
7