Subject-Aware Scoring
Unlike simple sharpness filters, Kestrel detects the bird first, ignoring busy backgrounds or foreground branches to give you a true quality score.
The Culling Problem, Solved.
Zero in on the winning shots without the pixel peeping.
Every bird photographer knows the pain: returning from a lovely birding outing with 3,000 photos, realizing that for every few hours you spent in the field, you'll need to spend another hour squinting at pixels to find the ones with the perfect focus.
Kestrel automates this by ranking every photo by objective subject sharpness, letting you jump straight to the sharpest frames.
Kestrel distinguishes the bird from the background to focus on what matters most, ensure
your quality score is accurate.
New in Kestrel
Meet Kestrel Culling Assistant.
A dedicated accept/reject workflow built to help you finish large culls in minutes, not hours.
Scenes are auto-grouped and organized into Accept and Reject piles so you can rapidly review
each burst.
- All photos are pre-grouped by scene and split into Accept and Reject using Kestrel ratings.
- Lightroom/Darktable Sync: Automatically generate XMP sidecar files to sync your ratings and culls into your favorite photo editor.
- Click an image to load high-resolution preview instantly for faster culling decisions.
- Use Shift+Click to move any photo to the other category.
- Progress is saved automatically while you cull.
- Kestrel only moves rejected photos into a dedicated rejects folder and never deletes your images.
- Use the built-in Tutorial button for a guided, step-by-step walkthrough.
How Culling Works
Streamlined for speed.
Instant Navigation
Select a burst and see it instantly sorted from sharpest to blurriest. Double-click any photo to open it immediately in Darktable, Lightroom, or Photoshop.
Scene Analysis Model
Kestrel's machine learning model is trained to take into account noise, motion blur, and sharpness to create a normalized quality score that can accurately differentiate between each frame in a scene.
Ready to reclaim your time?
Project Kestrel is free, open-source, and runs entirely on your machine. Your photos never leave your computer.