Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Face Recognition with Lightroom 6

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I downloaded Adobe Lightroom 6 and just fell in love with Face Recognition feature. Open a collection and then click on the little face [red arrow pointing to it] and it will bring up all the faces just like happens in Facebook when you upload images and it asks you if you want to tag people.

It takes time to explore new or upgraded software, so all I writing about is just what I discovered and loved immediately with the latest Lightroom upgrade. As I discover all the new bells and whistles in Lightroom 6 I will right about them if I see something worth my time.

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Throughout my career I have shot large projects and had to go through and identify everyone in the photo. Now I can at least scan a complete shoot and put the names that Lightroom sees into every photos metadata.

Now when you go to each photo you can check to see the names of people. If the face isn't recognized you can still click on box at bottom as I have done here and then create a box and then type in the person's name.

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Here it missed Philip Lin and I went back and then typed his name into the photo.

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It puts all the names in alphabetical order based on the first letter in the name. Now while the photo isn't captioned left to right as you would have in the caption–to have all the names from a large 3,000 + images in each photo is a huge time saver.

It put the names in two IPTC fields: 1) Keywords & 2) People Shown.


When you export you can remove all the names or add them with just a click. The names are all saved in your RAW files.

I can see most all my friends who are photojournalists and need to have names with all their photos being thrilled with this feature. The other group of photographers that will benefit is anyone who keeps a database of photos and needs to search them to find people.

I know of one client I have that this feature could possibly improve their image archive system almost overnight.


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