The Story of Retouch4me: the company behind AI-powered tools that changed how photographers work. Chapter 1: The Man Who Heard Color
How a sound engineer at the Bolshoi Theatre became the person who founded the company that has changed photo retouching forever.
People who spend years working with sound waves develop a particular kind of sensitivity to the hidden structure inside things. Oleg Sharonov spent a decade as a sound engineer at the Bolshoi Theatre — one of the most demanding listening environments in the world. By the time he left, he had learned to find the hidden structure inside anything he worked with.
That same skill carried over when photography became more than a hobby. He started shooting, then retouched his own work, and quickly hit a wall — repetitive post-production and tools that did not do the work properly. In particular, they treated color the wrong way.
Color as a living thing
To Oleg, color in a photograph felt like a living creature — hue, saturation, and luminosity all interacting at once. Yet every program he tried handled those elements in isolation, one slider at a time. It was like tuning an orchestra by adjusting each instrument separately and hoping the whole thing magically harmonized.
“The main idea behind 3D LUT Creator,” he said later, “was to let users actually sculpt the shape of the color cloud.”
He was thinking that way long before he wrote a single line of code.
The weekend everything changed
On a weekend in October 2013, he started building. The concept was simple: replace sliders with a flexible grid of control points spread across color space. Grab a point and pull it, and the transitions would follow naturally — no masks, no tedious selections, just direct control over where colors should go.
Within weeks, he shared a demo in a small social media photography community. The response was electric. Photographers and colorists immediately saw a fundamentally better way to work with color. Three days after that, he mentioned a Lightroom plugin was on the way.
Later that year, Oleg posted a public thank-you to the early testers, the people sharing screenshots, suggesting features, and helping strangers in the comments. It hinted at the kind of company taking shape: one that treated users as co-authors.
What the grid actually did
The A/B color grid — soon known simply as the “color net” — lets you shift the hue and saturation of any color by dragging a single point. Nearby colors stayed undisturbed, transitions remained smooth, and no selections were required. The documentation put it plainly: “you wouldn’t find this level of control in any other program”.
That claim held up for years. For example, DaVinci Resolve, the industry standard for professional color grading, didn’t introduce its own comparable grid-based tool until version 17 in late 2020 — seven years later.
The color grid was the first breakthrough. But another, bigger challenge was already waiting — and it would lead Oleg into two years of studying something that seemed completely unrelated to photography.