Your camera's colour first, your look second
You chose that camera partly for its skin tones. So every keeper opens in the studio looking the way your camera rendered it, already corrected for exposure and white balance, with your look laid on top.
The faithful edit
Each RAW is matched to your camera's own rendering, photo by photo, and then corrected. Exposure is read from the whites of the eyes when there are faces, so a darker-skinned bride isn't brightened as if she were underexposed. White balance won't cool skin by more than a touch. A white dress still reaches white without the lace turning into a blank, and vibrance leaves skin alone.
Your RAW is never changed. Each edit becomes its own version, a full-size JPEG at quality 95.
Fifty-four looks, at any strength
A look sets the mood: Film: Portra warm, Black & white classic, Moody & rich and 24 more. Nine are made for particular ceremonies, such as White wedding clean, Chinese red & gold and Nikah soft pastel, and, for Indian weddings, regional ones like Kerala natural green and South Indian temple gold.
You pick the look for the project and can change it for any photo. CullTone never chooses a look from skin tone, clothing or the kind of ceremony, and it won't start. A strength slider runs from none through the look as designed to half as much again, and anything you build in the studio can be saved as your own look. Every look and what it does.
Or your own style
Point CullTone at a Lightroom Classic catalog or a folder of XMP sidecars from past weddings and it learns how you edit: what you do to a backlit couple, what you do to a dark reception hall. So far we've only tried this on a simulated photographer. Whether it picks up a real photographer's taste is the question we most want the beta to answer.
Masks and face retouch
When the cull finishes, every keeper already has masks for people, background, sky, faces, skin, hands and arms, and face with neck, plus radial and linear masks for the rest. Brighten the sky without a halo round the bride's veil, or warm the couple and leave the hall alone; up to eight adjustments per photo.
Face retouch stays off until you switch it on, with three strengths: Natural, Soft and Polished. It smooths skin, heals small blemishes, lifts under-eye shadows, brightens eyes and whitens teeth, on every face or only the couple.
What retouch leaves exactly as it was. A bindi, kumkum, tilak, nose pin, mole or stone keeps its colour and brightness. Those belong to the person. There's no slimming, reshaping or feature changing either, and we don't plan any.
What you see is what you send
The studio preview matches the final file, so you aren't guessing at the render. Around it are the controls you'd expect: curves, HSL, colour grading, black and white, crop, straighten, undo and redo, a split or side-by-side compare, and copy and paste across a selection. Render changes renders only the photos whose edit changed.
Need one photo now? Download gives you the delivered version at full size, 2048 px for the web, a 4:5 Instagram crop or a WhatsApp size, from any device, with no watermark. On a phone it opens the share sheet, so you can save it to Photos. When a frame needs Photoshop, CullTone Desktop opens it there and each save comes back as a version you can deliver.
Before you rely on it
- Only Sony ARW files have been tested. Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm and DNG files should open but haven't been checked.
- Two looks shift skin colour too often: Moody & rich and Light & airy. The quality check will flag them.
- Nobody has compared these edits blind against a photographer's own.
- Culling works offline; editing needs an internet connection.
Edit a wedding in your look
Cull a shoot on the trial and the studio opens with every keeper already edited. Change the look, and Render changes renders only what moved.