Portrait UnionA photo is a moment. A portrait is a keepsake.
Portrait Union is an online studio that paints a portrait from one photo of a pet or a person in 12 styles with an image model, and restores old photographs in colour. Previews are free and watermarked, there is no account, the digital file costs €4.99, and a gallery canvas starts at €69.99 with shipping to 35 countries included.
Who runs it
Portrait Union is a one-person studio run from Slovenia with a few tools: no studio staff and no support desk, which is why hello@portraitunion.com goes to the same person who wrote this page, and why an email is answered within a working day rather than routed. It is also why each visitor gets one free preview a day: every generation is paid for whether or not it sells.
Sample portraits on this site were made from stock model photographs; customer portraits are never shown without permission.
What we believe
Identity comes first
A portrait that does not look like the subject is decoration. The model is instructed to hold eye colour, bone structure, breed markings and expression before it applies any style at all, and a pet keeps a real animal body rather than being dressed up in a human one.
Your photograph is yours
Uploads are never training data — not for us and not for the model provider. The preview link closes 48 hours after upload, and unpurchased work and the photograph behind it are purged within the following day, without you having to ask.
No account, no subscription
There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to remember to cancel, and no credit balance to spend down. One purchase, once, for the thing you actually chose.
The result before the price
Prices appear beside your finished preview, not in front of it. If you do not like what the studio made, you have paid nothing and there is no account left behind.
How it is made
Every portrait and every restoration here is made by an image model working from the photograph it is given, not painted by a person at an easel. The model runs on Google Cloud, the same processor the privacy page names. Each style is a separately written prompt rather than one filter wearing a dozen names: Renaissance Royal draws on old-master court portraiture, Greek God on classical sculpture, Samurai Warrior on Edo-period armour and ukiyo-e composition, Van Gogh Style on his late Saint-Rémy period. From your photo to a print, the steps are these:
- Upload. One JPG, PNG or WebP up to 15 MB. We work from a copy; the file on your phone is untouched.
- Centre crop to 4:5. The photograph is cropped to an upright portrait shape around its centre, so an upright photo with the subjects in the middle paints best and a wide photo loses its edges.
- One prompt per style. The style’s prompt is sent with rules that hold eye colour, bone structure, breed markings and expression before any style is applied.
- One watermarked preview. The model paints one picture, close and centred on the face, and you see it watermarked before paying anything. The clean file is held separately and released only once you have bought it.
- Upscale for print. When a print is ordered, the chosen file is enlarged once for the canvas so it holds up at 60 cm, then sent to production.
- Printed by Gelato near the delivery address. A Berlin order is made in Germany and a Sydney order in Australia, which is why shipping to the 35 countries we deliver to is included rather than added at checkout.
The honest limits: each visitor gets one free preview a day, because every generation is paid for whether or not it sells; occasionally only one variant comes back, when a generation fails; and the result depends more on the source photo than on the style, so a blurred or backlit face stays a blurred or backlit face.
Photo restoration is a different job and is treated as one. It repairs damage and returns the photograph in full colour, but it stays conservative — it will not invent a face the original does not show — and it keeps the picture’s own proportions instead of cropping it to a portrait shape. A restoration returns one preview.