Street photography culling for the moment, not the pixel
The best frame of the day is slightly soft, a little tilted, and the man with the umbrella is half out of shot. Keep it. CullTone's street preset scores timing, layering and variety ahead of sharpness, and its travel preset makes sure every place you visited keeps its frames.
Why a strict culler is the wrong culler on the street
On a street frame, sharpness is the least useful thing software can judge. So the street preset weights composition and variety highest and sharpness lowest, and even then judges your focus against the rest of your own day, so a dim alley isn't punished for being a dim alley.
- Motion blur isn't flagged. A smeared cyclist may be the picture.
- Dark frames are accepted as low-key, and ISO 12,800 passes without a noise flag.
- A crowd isn't judged like a posed group, so one blink in the background doesn't sink the frame.
- One frame is kept from each run of near-identical shots, and at least one from every situation you lingered over.
- The preset aims for a tight edit, around fifteen frames in a hundred.
Every place keeps its frames
The travel preset starts a new scene after five quiet minutes and keeps at least two frames from each, so the market, the ferry and the temple all survive the cull.
Places as much as faces
Variety counts for more than composition in the travel preset, so a run of portraits doesn't bury the landscapes and street scenes from the same trip.
Brackets stay together
Hand-held or tripod brackets are kept as one set, and horizons tilted by more than a degree are flagged on travel scenes.
Street and travel side by side
Both presets walk all day, find people, animals and vehicles in the frame, and keep the selection varied. Street forgives blur and tilt and keeps around fifteen frames in a hundred. Travel checks horizons, holds brackets together, corrects white balance a little more and keeps around a quarter of the trip, because a client or a magazine wants a story across days. Pick the one that matches how the frames will be used.
Edits that don't change what happened
Looks in CullTone change tone and colour, never content, which keeps documentary work honest. Black & white classic and Black & white high contrast cover most street work; Vintage fade and Fine-art film give a printed-on-film feel. For travel, Film: Fuji cool, Golden-hour glow and Cinematic teal & orange suit very different places. If you ever paint out a distraction or change a photo with a prompt, it's saved as a separate version and labelled as AI-edited in the app, the gallery and the file metadata. The labelling guide explains why that matters for editorial clients.
Delivering to editors and clients
A picture editor or a tourism client opens one link, hearts the frames they want and approves or asks for a redo with a note. Downloads come one at a time or as a ZIP when you switch them on. If you finish in Lightroom, XMP sidecars carry every rating and reason; see the Lightroom handoff.
Will it straighten my deliberately tilted frames?
No. A tilt flag on a travel frame is a note with a suggestion, and the street preset doesn't check horizons at all. Nothing changes unless you apply it.
What do I need to run it?
A Mac with Apple silicon. Culling runs there at no charge per photo. CullTone is in beta; there's no Windows build yet.
Mostly mountains and night skies? Try the landscape and astro page.
Bring the walk you haven't looked at yet
Thirty days free. After that, plans start at $9 a month. See the plans.