  We promote the use of narrow-band (0.05 -- 0.20 nm FWHM) imaging in the
molecularvCN band head at 388.33 nm as an effective method for monitoring
small-scale magnetic field elements because it renders them with exceptionally
high contrast. We create synthetic narrow-band CN filtergrams from spectra
computed from a three-dimensional snapshot of a magnetohydrodynamic simulation
of the solar convection to illustrate the expected high contrast and explain
its nature. In addition, we performed observations with the horizontal slit
spectrograph at the Dunn Solar Tower at 388.3 nm to experimentally confirm the
high bright-point contrast, and to characterize and optimize the transmission
profile of a narrow-band (0.04 FWHM) Lyot filter, which was built by Lyot and
tailored to the CN band at Sacramento Peak in the early 70's. The presented
theoretical computations predict that bright-point contrast in narrow-band
(0.04 FWHM) CN filtergrams is more than 3 times higher than in CN filtergrams
taken with 1 nm FWHM wide filters, and in typical G-band filtergrams.
