About Portrait Union
Portrait Union is an independent AI portrait studio that turns ordinary photos into museum-quality artwork. Pets, families, kids, couples, self-portraits — any face, any species, any number of subjects — reimagined across 9 distinct art styles. Most portraits are ready in under a minute, starting at €9.99.
Why Portrait Union exists
Commissioning a real portrait painter costs anywhere from €500 to €5,000 and takes weeks. The result is beautiful — but completely out of reach for most of the people who would love one most: pet parents who lost their dog last year, families who want to mark a milestone, couples who want to remember an anniversary, kids whose parents want to immortalize them at age 4.
Portrait Union was built to make that kind of artwork accessible to everyone. Not by replacing artists — by giving the rest of us a way to celebrate the people and pets we love, in a form that's worth keeping forever.
How the AI pipeline actually works
Portrait generation runs on Google Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (also known as "Nano Banana"), which produces a 1024 × 1280 pixel portrait at a 4:5 aspect ratio. The output is then upscaled through Replicate's Recraft Crisp Upscale model, with Real-ESRGAN as a fallback, to a final resolution of up to 4096 × 5120 pixels — 4K, suitable for printing at 75 × 100 cm without quality loss.
Print orders are fulfilled through Gelato's global production network, which means a 40 × 50 cm canvas printed for a customer in Berlin is produced in Germany, while one ordered from Sydney is produced in Australia. No international shipping fees, no two-week customs delays.
Our 9 art styles
Each style was tuned for face preservation, breed accuracy, and recognizability. Renaissance Royal references court portraits from the 15th–16th centuries (Leonardo, Raphael, Titian). Greek God references classical sculpture. Samurai Warrior references Edo-period yoroi armor and ukiyo-e composition. Pop Art references Warhol and Lichtenstein. Van Gogh references his late Saint-Rémy period. Gothic Noble draws from Northern Renaissance and Gothic Revival aesthetics. Each style is its own pipeline — not a filter, not an overlay, but a complete artistic reinterpretation.
Privacy and your photos
Your uploaded photos are processed securely and never used to train AI models. Photos from paid accounts are stored privately and accessible only to you. Free preview photos are automatically deleted after 24 hours. We never share your photos with third parties or use them for advertising. Payment processing is handled by Stripe — we never see or store your card details.
Independent and bootstrapped
Portrait Union is independently operated. No outside investors, no growth-at-all-costs pressure, no data harvesting. The product exists to serve the people who upload their photos to it — and that's the only metric that matters.