The Fastest Way to Cull Concert Photos, According to a Photographer Who's Shot Billie Eilish

Three songs. No flash. And by the time you're backstage packing up, you already have somewhere between 800 and 1,000 frames from a set that lasted maybe twelve minutes.

That's the reality for Christina Demertzi, a concert and festival photographer based in Germany who has shot Billie Eilish and some of Europe's biggest festivals. Her post-production problem isn't a lack of good frames, it's that burst mode hands her twenty near-identical images of the same two-second moment, over and over, and she has to find the one that's actually usable before an artist's team wants a gallery the same night.

"Before narrative, it took me one to two hours to cull," she says. "With narrative, it's more like half an hour." Here's the process behind that number, step by step.

Step 1: Study the set before the first song

Christina's prep starts before she ever steps into the pit. "I like to prepare by watching videos on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, so I know where to stand or what lens I need for the moments that matter in the first three songs," she says.

It's a small habit with a real payoff. Knowing roughly when an artist moves to one side of the stage, or when a jump happens, means she's already positioned for it instead of reacting after the moment has passed. It doesn't shorten her cull time directly, but it cuts down on how much unusable footage she has to shoot through in the first place.

Step 2: Group bursts into scenes, not frames

Back at the laptop, the mistake is treating a burst sequence like 20 separate photos to judge one at a time. Christina imports into Narrative and uses Scenes View, which automatically groups a burst sequence into a single scene.

"One thing I really love about narrative is the scenes view, which groups your pictures," she says. "I can easily go through a scene by clicking up and down." Instead of paging through 20 nearly identical frames of one moment, she reviews one scene, picks the best frame, and moves on. It's the single biggest reason her cull time dropped.

Step 3: Zoom into the face before you decide

At pit distance, a subject's face is often small in the frame, and expression is the whole game. A technically sharp shot with a mic covering the artist's face, or eyes shut, still isn't a keeper.

"What I'm trying to pay attention to is never uploading a picture where the artist doesn't look their best," Christina says. "I'm always very careful with facial expressions." The Close-Ups Panel zooms into every face in a scene automatically. "I don't have to zoom into every picture to see what the face looks like," she says. Each face also carries a status flag for eye state and focus, an easy way to rule out an obvious miss without opening the full image.

Step 4: Filter by person on group shots

Full-band shots raise the difficulty: multiple people, multiple expressions, and all of them need to work at once. "You can filter by person," Christina says. "If you're shooting a whole band, you go to the people filter and choose one person, and you get the zoom in, so you can see if the eyes are closed or the focus isn't quite right." For a moment where three musicians share the frame, that's the difference between guessing and actually checking each face.

Step 5: Let the ranking narrow it down, not decide for you

The software ranks each scene, and the top pick is usually the right one. It's a starting point, not the final word. "I still decide myself, in the end, which picture I like to choose," Christina says.

That matters most on creative shots that break the normal rules of a "correct" exposure. "I choose the pictures that are out of focus, the ones that are creatively right, even when they're not technically correct," she says, describing how she'll dig past the AI's top-ranked frame for an intentional motion blur or a deliberately soft shot. She was skeptical of handing any of this to AI at first. "I was skeptical, a hundred percent," she says, "but I realized it saved me so much time."

Step 6: Ship your five-star picks, and keep every raw

The last step is sending rated selects to Lightroom for editing. Narrative writes changes as XMP sidecar files rather than touching the original RAW, so the export carries over star ratings, tags, and any AI preset applied, without altering the source image. Christina only ships her five-star picks, turning a shoot of 800 to 1,000 frames into a delivery gallery of roughly 100 to 150.

One lesson she's learned the hard way: never delete your raw files. "I've been asked for pictures after a show, and I had already deleted the raw files, so I couldn't deliver what they wanted," she says. Clearing space on the road is tempting. It's also the one step in this whole process you can't undo.

That's culling, not editing, but one habit from her Lightroom pass is worth carrying over. No-flash concert shots mean pushing ISO high, which leaves grain to clean up afterward. Christina runs Lightroom's AI denoiser on nearly every image, but not at full strength. "I use the AI denoiser all the time, but you have to be careful," she says. "Sometimes they end up looking like weird museum paintings. Don't go the full 100 percent. Stay around 75 or 80."

The workflow, not just the software

None of this replaces judgment. The AI's job is narrow: group duplicates, flag the obvious misses, and get a photographer to the real decision faster. The pick itself, especially anything creative that breaks the normal rules of a "correct" exposure, is still made by the person looking at the frame. Turning a twelve-song, thousand-frame set into a same-day gallery isn't about a new skill. It's about a workflow built for volume and a short deadline, the exact combination event and concert photography demands.

Try it yourself: Narrative offers a free trial, no credit card required, on the Ultra plan, so you can run your own burst-mode files through Scenes View and the Close-Ups Panel before deciding if it fits. Start your free trial.

See the full time breakdown: For the complete before-and-after on cull time, read how long event and concert culling actually takes.

Watch the full conversation: This article is drawn from a live Narrative webinar with Christina Demertzi. Watch the full webinar on YouTube.