Landscape photo culling that keeps brackets and stacks whole
A five-frame bracket is one photograph, and a culler that throws out its darkest frame for being dark has just broken your merge. CullTone's landscape and astro presets cull in sets: brackets and focus stacks stay together, corners and horizons get checked, and a night sky is allowed to be night.
Brackets kept as one
Three or more frames of one scene at stepped exposures are found from the camera data and decided together: all kept or all to Review, never split.
Focus stacks too
A run of frames where the focus distance walks one way is recognised as a stack and kept whole for your merge.
Corner to corner
Sharpness is measured across the whole frame, and soft corners get flagged by name.
Level horizons
A horizon tilted by more than about a degree is flagged, with a straighten suggestion beside it.
Same tripod, different night
Landscape and astro work share a slow, deliberate rhythm: a tripod, sets of frames, and a merge or stack in another program afterwards. Both presets turn off motion-blur flags, because smooth water and drifting cloud are the long exposure doing its job. Both measure sharpness edge to edge. Where they part ways is light.
| Landscape | Astro | |
|---|---|---|
| Dark frames | Judged for exposure; both ends clipping is flagged | Expected; a dark sky is correct exposure |
| High ISO | Flagged above ISO 6,400 | No cost up to ISO 51,200 |
| White balance in the starting edit | Corrected lightly | Left alone: night-sky colour is your choice |
| Frames grouped together | A few seconds apart | Up to 40 seconds apart, for interval shooting |
| Kept per group | One, unless it's a bracket or stack | Up to three |
| Faces | Noticed, rarely matter | Not looked for at all |
One thing astro shooters should plan for. A Milky Way stack shot at identical settings is grouped as one interval sequence, and CullTone keeps the best few of it rather than all thirty. Nothing is deleted, so select those frames and move them back to Keep before you export to your stacking software. Exposure brackets and focus stacks don't need that step.
Looks for big light
Golden-hour glow warms a sunset without turning it orange. Film: Fuji cool gives crisp greens and cool shadows for alpine and coastal work. Moody & rich and Low-key dramatic suit storms and blue hour, and Black & white high contrast darkens skies for graphic monochrome. True to camera is there when you'd rather grade from scratch. Most landscape photographers will finish in Lightroom, so XMP sidecars carry ratings, labels and develop settings across; the Lightroom handoff explains what's in them.
Selling prints and licences
Share a gallery with a print buyer, a gallery owner or a tourism client. They heart and approve frames and ask for changes with a note, and you decide whether full-size downloads are on. Final JPEGs are exported at quality 95. There's no watermark option yet, so for print sales keep downloads off until you're paid. See how client galleries handle expiry and revoking.
Worth asking
Does CullTone merge HDR brackets or stack stars?
No. It keeps every set together and hands it to the tool you already merge with, so no frame you need goes missing.
Can I cull on location?
On a Mac with Apple silicon, yes, with no charge per photo. CullTone is in beta and there's no Windows build yet.
Travel work too? The street and travel page covers mixed days.
Bring your last trip's brackets
Thirty days free. Plans from $9 a month, priced by storage, never by frame. Plans and storage limits.