What culling and curation are
Culling is the first pass through a shoot — the one that removes everything not worth keeping so that what remains is a usable working set. A unit stills photographer can deliver hundreds of frames a day, full of duplicates, test shots, blinks and misfires, and culling strips those out before anyone spends time on review or approval.
Culling and curation are used interchangeably for this work, and you will hear it called the edit as well — as in editing a shoot down to what matters. That last term is worth flagging, because it is not the same as image retouching: editing in this sense means choosing which frames survive, not adjusting exposure, colour or anything within the frame itself.
It is a filtering step, not a creative one. The aim is to get from raw volume to a considered selection: clearing the obvious rejects so producers, publicists and talent only ever look at frames that are genuinely in contention.
Culling comes before the finer work of agreeing the final key selects, and it makes a contact sheet far more useful by keeping the noise off it. Image Approvals can handle this first pass as part of its curation service, so productions review a clean set rather than wading through thousands of frames. For where culling sits in the wider pipeline, see our unit stills photography guide.