Culling
Kestrel scores every frame for sharpness, groups your bursts into scenes, and sorts them sharpest-first — so your review session is about artistic decisions, not pixel-peeping.
Rejected photos go into a /Kestrel Rejects folder. Archive them or
delete them yourself — whenever you're ready, on your own terms.
Culling Assistant
Built for the days when you come home with 2,000 frames and need to quickly cut the bulk.
Scenes are automatically grouped. The sharpest frames confidently rise to the top of your Accept pile.
No loading wait. Click any image to instantly preview it in full resolution and review your burst.
All picks sync smoothly. Kestrel generates XMP sidecar files natively supported by Lightroom and Darktable.
Culling Rules
No two outings are the same. Kestrel lets you dial in your rules in plain English.
Set a floor for what you'll accept. Anything below gets moved out automatically. If you only want to keep sharp, clean frames, just tell Kestrel where your line is.
If you burst at 12 fps, you probably don't need 40 nearly-identical frames. Cap how many keepers can come out of a single scene — Kestrel does the triage, you make the final call.
Unlike simple sharpness filters, Kestrel detects the bird first, ignoring busy backgrounds or foreground branches to give you a true, objective quality score.
How Kestrel fits in
Kestrel sits between your camera and your editor, doing all the heavy lifting before you even launch Lightroom.
Project Kestrel is free, open-source, and runs entirely on your machine. Your photos never leave your computer.
