Chapter 4: Here Comes Retouch4me
2021–2026: Three co-founders, one vision, and 300,000 users
Heal was the first AI plugin of the Retouch4me company. Photographers who’d spent years doing this work by hand kept saying the same thing: why didn’t this exist before? But the growing company required even more expertise in retouching and management.
The team takes shape
Alexey Tsarev had run Paragon Retouch, a high-end retouching studio. He knew exactly what separates a natural result from something that looks processed — what clients actually notice and where retouchers spend their time. When he came on as co-founder, the team finally had someone who could define “great retouching” with authority — and who built the partner network that helped the company reach photographers in more than 120 countries.
Three co-founders, three complementary strengths: Oleg, the builder of the AI; Vitaly, who lived the photographer’s daily workflow and helped the community learn the tools; Alexey, who set the standard for what great retouching looks like and built the partnerships to match.Retouch4me’s suite of AI tools grew gradually based on the most tedious retouching tasks photographers faced. After Heal came Dodge & Burn, Portrait Volumes, White Teeth, Eye Brilliance, Skin Tone, Fabric, Clean Backdrop, Skin Mask — each a focused neural network trained on one specific professional task. The rule for each AI plugin stayed consistent: one job, done well enough to trust on client work.
It always came back to frequency
On New Year’s Eve 2022, Retouch4me launched its first free tool as a present to every photographer: Frequency Separation. Unlike the AI plugins already in the company’s portfolio, it was built for manual retouching — giving photographers direct, non-destructive control over the separate layers of an image. The interface borrowed its logic from audio equalizers, allowing photographers to adjust frequencies the way a sound engineer would tune sound. For Oleg, who before writing a single line of code spent a decade as a sound engineer, it was the most personal product in the suite.
To the clouds
In September 2022, the Retouch4me Photoshop Panel unified all Retouch4me AI plugins into a single workflow inside the software photographers already used. In 2024, cloud processing was added to the Panel — delivering fast results without demanding high-end local hardware. 3D LUT Mobile 2 brought Retouch4me’s AI retouching tools to iOS and Android, so photographers could do professional AI edits straight from their phone. Then came Arams with culling, coloring and retouching capabilities, and Apex for simplified cloud-based retouching.
The numbers tell the rest: over 300,000 users worldwide, more than 8 million photos AI-culled and retouched in the cloud, users in more than 120 countries worldwide. Then the work crossed into video — AI plugins for DaVinci Resolve that brought the same natural retouching to editors working frame by frame.
The world notices
In December 2024, the Technical Image Press Association named Retouch4me the best AI portrait editing software of the year. Reviews in PetaPixel, TechRadar, and Fstoppers kept making the same point: this was what AI tools could look like when built by people who actually understood professional photography.
Six years. A portfolio of AI-powered photo and video editing tools. Three founders. Hundreds of thousands of users.
The final chapter is about what it all means — and where it goes from here.