THE DARKROOM NOTES / 04
Find the frames
you'll want to show first.
The client preview. The social teaser. The shots that open the gallery. Perfect Shot gives Pro and Whole Roll customers a shortlist of up to 5% or 10%, with reasons and nearby alternatives to help you make your picks.
What Perfect Shot looks for
Perfect Shot ranks the unique, completed photo reviews in one local library. It considers composition, light, and the strength of the moment alongside Chimp’s existing quality assessment. It then uses local visual groups and nearby file sequences to spread the shortlist across the shoot. These are approximations based on image similarity, paths, and saved file times, not verified capture-time scenes. Similar frames stay together, with one suggestion and nearby alternatives you can compare instead of a row of almost identical picks.
Open a pick to see its selection reason, the group it came from, and the alternatives kept close by. The coverage summary also shows which parts of the shoot reached the shortlist. That makes an omission visible; it does not pretend every important moment can be inferred from the photographs alone.
The saved label is Top quality. It sits beside the focus assessment and your rating; it does not replace either one. A sharp frame can still miss the shortlist, and a meaningful photograph may matter to you even when Chimp does not rank it highly.
Choose how short the list should be
The default cap is 5% of the unique completed photos in the library. You can choose 10% when you want a wider first pass, or save no picks. The cap is a ceiling, not a quota: a library can have fewer picks, or none, when there are no clear standouts.
The percentage is applied to the whole local library using a strict, rounded-down share. A library with 842 unique completed photos can save at most 42 picks at 5% or 84 at 10%. Recalculate after reviews are added or changed; Perfect Shot ranks the library as it exists at that time.
It uses reviews you already paid for
Perfect Shot does not spend extra review credits. It relies on the quality assessment included with a current completed review. Older or inconclusive results may lack that assessment and stay out of the ranking. You can choose to review them again at the selected Standard or Turbo credit rate. Failed reviews return their credit and are not included in the shortlist.
New verified accounts can try Perfect Shot for 14 days with the 100-photo trial. Saved picks remain in the local library afterward. Creating a new shortlist after the trial requires Pro or Whole Roll.
Everything stays with the local library
The companion calculates and saves the picks locally. It does not write to the source photos or move files automatically. Export the result in JSONL or CSV, or include the custom quality fields in XMP sidecars. The Capture One profile keeps those custom fields but does not add a new Perfect Shot keyword bag.
Your original photos and local catalog stay on your computer. The underlying photo review still sends prepared JPEG evidence through the service to Google, under the processing and normal retention described in the privacy policy. Perfect Shot does not turn Image Chimp into a hosted photo library.