Aftershoot or CullTone: one plan from card to client
You shot it on Saturday. It's Monday, and thousands of frames stand between you and a happy client. CullTone sorts the card, edits the keepers in your look and hands the client a gallery, all on one flat plan, with a plain reason next to every photo it sets aside.
Our pick: CullTone. One plan covers the cull, the edit and the client gallery, so there is one bill and one login. Every photo gets Keep, Review or Archive with the reason beside it, nothing is ever deleted, and the same files always give the same piles.
CullTone runs on a Mac with Apple silicon; Windows is not available yet.
The two side by side
| CullTone | Aftershoot | |
|---|---|---|
| Culling | In every plan, from $9 a month | Select, $10 a month yearly or $15 monthly |
| Editing | 54 looks in every plan; your own learned style on Pro ($19) | Edit, $30 a month yearly or $35 monthly |
| Retouching | Face retouch inside the edit | Retouch, $20 a month yearly or $25 monthly |
| All of it | Pro, $19 a month | Complete, $540 a year ($45 a month) or $55 monthly |
| Client galleries | Included: 100 GB on Pro | Billed separately: free with 10 GB, $15 a month yearly for 500 GB, $30 for unlimited |
| Computers | Mac with Apple silicon | Mac or PC, 8 GB RAM minimum |
| Status | Private beta; billing not live yet | On sale; 30-day free trial |
What a year of cull, edit and gallery costs
After every shoot you need the same three things: a cull, an edit and somewhere to deliver. CullTone Pro is $19 a month, or $228 over twelve months, and it covers all three, including a personal style learned from your own edits and galleries with 100 GB of storage.
At Aftershoot those are two products. The Complete plan (culling, editing and retouching) is $540 a year on Aftershoot's pricing page, and Aftershoot Galleries is billed on its own: Premium, with 500 GB, is $15 a month billed annually. Together that comes to $720 a year.
There is no per-photo charge on any CullTone plan and no overage. If you reach your storage cap, new galleries wait and the ones your clients already have stay up.
A reason on every frame
The first decisions appear within seconds of the card going in. Every photo lands in Keep, Review or Archive with a sentence you can check: eyes closed, motion blur, a sharper frame in the same burst. You spend your evening on the Review pile and a quick look through Archive, then move on.
Bursts and near-duplicates are grouped across every camera on the day, with a fix for the second shooter whose camera clock is an hour out. Move any photo you disagree with. Nothing is deleted.
Edits in your look, from the first shoot
Pick one of 54 looks for the project, or let CullTone learn your style from your Lightroom catalogs or XMP sidecars. The edit starts from your camera's own colour, then fixes exposure, white balance and highlights, so skin looks like skin.
Face retouch is part of the edit and leaves bindis, kumkum, tilak, nose pins and moles alone. Want to finish in Lightroom? Each photo gets an XMP sidecar with its rating, colour label, reason and develop settings.
The gallery comes with the cull
When the edit is done, the client gets a private link. They can heart favourites, approve, ask for a redo, comment and download single photos or a ZIP, while you set the expiry date, switch downloads off or revoke the link whenever you like. A quality check flags skin colour shifts and clipped highlights before anything reaches them, and any photo changed with AI is labelled as such. More on the client galleries page and on Lightroom handoff.
Cull your next shoot in CullTone
The trial lasts 30 days, costs nothing and runs on a Mac with Apple silicon.