Lightroom: Face anonymizer tool

This has to be a tool with a pretty narrow use-case and audience. I certainly wouldn't want it on my Develop module.

Not to mention that unless you do this with a pixel editor, it is likely anyone with a bit of skill could easily recover the information you are hiding.

A round-trip to a pixel editor is your best and safest bet.

Probably a better idea for Photoshop.

You could also leverage an action to speed up the process. Hit record

1. Duplicate the layer
2. Filter>Pixelate>Mosaic (or another suitable effect)
3. Layer>Layer Mask>Hide All
4. Select the Brush tool
5. Set Default Foreground/Background colors

Play back the action, then paint with white where you want the face to be obscured.

Like this? Won't always work since you need a flat spot to heal from...

Ok. First of all thanks for your responses. Let me explain a little bit better...

I'm a commercial photographer, lately shooting a lot of public acts, politician meetings, etc, where a lot of people is involved.... Sometimes when you take a picture there are people in the background passing by or looking to the crowd... Anyway, I got sued by one of this guys that recognize himself in a picture and I have to pay him 1800 €....

I know i can do it in Photoshop but it breaks my workflow badly, I normally shoot like 200-300 raw's, clean it with Photomechanic to 30-40 keepers, import the keepers in Lightroom for processing and upload to a private gallery for the client. I'm not touching Photoshop for this kind of assignment.

The idea is to have a fast way to select some faces that I want to anonymize (people in the background, bodyguards, etc...), without breaking the workflow and messing with duplicates files and round trips to Photoshop. I think it could be a nice tool for press and social photographers, and quite easy to implement.

It could be in the same spot that red eye tool, and working similar, just select a face, as you do with an eye and you have a mosaic over the face and 1800 € more in your pocket, that we could spend in Adobe products! ;)

Best regards

pd. Lee Jay, yes, that could work but not always, i will try it...