Help center

After you subscribe on vantagecull.com you'll get a download link. On Mac, open the .dmg and drag Vantage into Applications. On Windows, run Vantage-Setup.exe and follow the installer. You can also grab either from vantagecull.com/download.

On first launch, sign in with the same email and password you used to subscribe — the app checks your subscription and unlocks. On Windows the installer isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen shows “Windows protected your PC” — click More info, then Run anyway.

Point Vantage at a shoot folder (drag it onto the window, or use the folder picker). RAW or JPEG, any camera. It scores, classifies and groups every photo as it goes — you can start reviewing before it finishes.

• Green KEEP / amber REVIEW / red CUT is a starting point, not the final call.
• Near-duplicate bursts are grouped so you pick one hero per angle.

Your licence is cached locally, so you stay signed in across restarts and can work offline. The app quietly re-checks your subscription about once a day, so a cancellation is picked up without you doing anything.

Every photo gets a 0–100 score from a model trained on thousands of hand-graded examples — composition, light, angle and sharpness all feed in. KEEP/REVIEW/CUT are score bands you can tune.

Culling is fastest from the keyboard: arrow keys to move, P to pick, X to reject, 1–5 for star ratings, and number/letter keys for colour labels. Press ? in the app for the full shortcut overlay.

Slide the keep-rate to make Vantage more or less aggressive. The duplicate-sensitivity slider controls how tightly near-identical frames are grouped — loosen it to split a burst into more groups, tighten it to merge them.

Type things like "low front 3/4 with the sun behind" or "kitchen interior" — no keyword tagging needed first. You can also filter by flag, rating, colour label, or by person once face grouping has run.

The Edit view applies a colour grade in your style. When you export to Lightroom, the grade comes through as editable develop settings — not a baked-in look — so you can fine-tune it in Lightroom afterwards.

Export writes standard XMP sidecar files next to your RAWs carrying ratings, flags, colour labels and develop settings.

If ratings don't appear in Lightroom, check Catalog Settings → Metadata → Automatically write changes into XMP is on, and in the Library module use Metadata → Read Metadata from Files to pull them in.

For portraits, Vantage can apply light skin retouching on export. It's designed to be subtle — a clean-up pass, not a plastic look.

Every subscription includes both, switchable per shoot:

• Local runs entirely on your Mac or PC — nothing is uploaded, works offline, uses your own GPU/CPU.
• Cloud uploads to a GPU server, processes there and sends results back — frees up your machine and gives consistent speed.

In cloud mode your originals are uploaded only for the duration of processing and are actively deleted the moment your results are ready — not kept, not used for anything else, not shared. Local mode never uploads anything at all.

Vantage is a single £15.99/month plan with everything included — unlimited shoots, local and cloud, Mac and Windows. Billing is handled securely by Stripe.

To change your payment method or cancel, contact support and we'll send you a secure Stripe billing link. Cancelling is straightforward with no lock-in — you keep access until the end of the paid period.

If something's not right, get in touch within a reasonable window and we'll sort it out. We'd always rather fix the problem, so tell us what went wrong.

Vantage runs a local engine behind the scenes on first launch, which can take a moment. If it stays stuck: quit fully, relaunch, and make sure your Mac allows the app to run (right-click → Open the first time). If it persists, contact support with your macOS version.

This is almost always Lightroom's metadata settings — turn on "Automatically write changes into XMP", then "Read Metadata from Files" on the imported photos. See Exporting to Lightroom above.

Make sure you're signing into the app with the exact same email you paid with. Give it a few seconds after payment for the subscription to register, then try signing in again. Still stuck? Contact support.