Culling Studio helps save you time with culling by rating your photos and grouping them according to your preferences. If you need help using Culling Studio, see our guide.

Rating criteria

Culling Studio rates photos like this:

• Keepers: The best photo in a group of similar photos.
• Standalones: There are no alternatives to this photo. These photos don't have duplicates and aren't part of a group.
• Duplicates: The remaining duplicate photos that weren't selected in the group.

You can also choose to enable Low-rated as a rating category. Low-rated photos are blurry, accidentally captured, or improperly exposed. When you rate photos as Low-rated, your final pick will have fewer photos:

• There might be fewer groups of similar photos since Low-rated photos aren’t included in the groups. 
• If all the photos in a group are blurry, entire scenes might be filtered out.

Grouping criteria

Culling Studio groups photos according to their similarity.  Adjusting the grouping criteria in the preferences affects the number of photos it selects as Keepers and Standalones.

These are the grouping criteria:

• Less Similar groups photos with a lower level of similarity.
  Choosing this setting will result in fewer photos being selected as Keepers and Standalone.
• Similar is the recommended similarity level and set as the default setting. This setting will group photos that share similarities but are not identical.
• Very similar only groups photos that are almost identical, resulting in more groups and more photos selected. Choose this option if you wish to receive more photos from Culling Studio.

Rating methods

These are the rating methods that Culling Studio supports:

• Star rating: When using star ratings, keep the same star rating for both Keepers and Standalones. They are both equally important and are reviewed together.
• Color Labels: When using color labels, you use different colors for Keepers and Standalones. Colors do not indicate that one photo is better than the other as stars tend to indicate.
• Flags: The flagging method uses a simpler Yes/No approach. The Keepers and Standalones will be flagged, and the Duplicates will be left unflagged. You can review the flagged photos and then remove the flag if they don’t make the final cut.

We recommend that you review Keepers and Standalones together since they both require a photographer’s professional eye. For example, we give both Keepers and Standalones the same rating since they are equally important, and you need to review them together.

You can choose the rating method for each type and customize the color labels and star ratings to fit your workflow.

Here are the Culling Studio’s defaults for the different rating methods:

Changing culling results by adjusting preferences

When you create a new culling project or cull again, you can adjust the culling preferences to change how Culling Studio rates photos and groups them.

Recommended flow for reviewing the culling results

1. By default,  Keepers and Standalones are filtered together. Review them to make sure they are your best photos.
   
   
   
2. When you think Culling Studio didn’t pick the best photo, filter to see only the Duplicates. These are similar to the Keepers and might be valuable, especially if you need more than one shot of the same scene.
   
   
3. Filter to see only the Low-rated photos to make sure you didn’t miss any important shots.
   
   
4. (Optional) Depending on how many final photos you need to deliver, follow these suggestions:

• • When reviewing the images, give a high rating (5 stars) to images that stand out. 
  • Give a low rating (1 star) to images you want removed from the selection. 
  • Adjust the grouping criteria to get fewer Keepers.

Cull again

If you want to change how Culling Studio rates photos and groups them, try changing the culling preferences. Then, cull the project again without the need to re-upload the photos.

1. On the Projects page, find your project. 
   
   
2. Click the More options menu (3 dots) on the right side, and click Cull again. The Culling preferences page opens.
   
    
3. Change the grouping criteria and how it rates the photos. 
   
   
4. Click Cull Again.