About Umber Portrait

Last updated September 22, 2026

Umber Portrait makes painted portraits of pets and people from photographs you already have. You upload a photo, choose a style, and see the result for free in about a minute. If you like it, you buy a digital file or a print. That is the whole business.

How your portrait is made

Every portrait is AI-created from the photo you upload, reviewed by a person on our team before printing, and produced by professional print partners. Nobody paints it by hand. This is the part we want to be unambiguous about, because a lot of the market is not.

Our print partners have local print works in the United States and the United Kingdom, so nothing crosses an ocean to reach you.

No one paints it by hand. We do not use the words "hand-painted", "artist-painted" or "brush-painted" anywhere on this site, in our emails, or in anything we would run as an advertisement. Those words describe a different product at a different price, and using them here would be a lie.

What the human review step actually does: someone looks at every portrait before it goes to a printer, checks that the animal or person in it matches the photo you sent, and sends it back to be remade if it does not. That is a real step and it is why print orders are held for 12 hours.

The steps, in order

1. You upload one to four photos. They go to private storage; nothing is public at any point.
2. A generative image model produces the portrait in the style you picked, keeping species, count and markings from your photo. Three or more subjects go to a higher-capability model.
3. You see a watermarked preview, at no cost and with no account, in about a minute.
4. If you buy, payment is handled by Stripe's hosted checkout. We never see or store a card number.
5. A digital file is upscaled and delivered immediately. A print waits 12 hours first, so there is time to ask for a change before anything is printed.
6. After the hold, the file goes to a print partner, and you get a tracking link when it ships.
7. Your original upload is deleted 30 days after you send it.

What we print on

Prints are made on alkaline, high-cotton fine-art paper or cotton canvas. That is a material specification rather than an adjective: the Library of Congress attributes the browning and embrittling of ordinary paper to "acid hydrolysis", notes that mechanical pulping "does not remove lignin from the wood, which promotes acid hydrolysis" (Library of Congress), and recommends alkaline papers mixed with cotton "for permanent documents". We ask our print partners for that specification. Read more about what archival means on a print, or see the sizes and prices.

Why this exists

The two existing options are a commissioned painter — two to six weeks, $150 to $1,000 and up, and you commit before seeing anything — or a template print site, which is cheap and produces something that could be anyone's dog.

The gap is a portrait that is specifically your animal, that you can look at before you pay, at a price that does not require a decision. That is what we built.

What we will not do

• No invented reviews. We launched with no testimonials on the site at all, because we had no customers yet. Review sections appear only when there are real orders behind them.
• No fake scarcity or countdown timers. The price is the price.
• No copyrighted characters, brands or real public figures in generated portraits.
• No selling or publishing your photos. They are used to make your portrait and deleted after 30 days.

Where we are

We are a very small operation — small enough that the person reviewing your portrait is likely to be the person who replies to your email. Printing and delivery are handled by established print partners with works in both the US and the UK, so nothing ships internationally to reach you.

Talk to us

If something is wrong with a portrait, tell us. We would much rather remake it than have it hanging on your wall looking not quite right. Our contact address is the one named in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, and the returns and refunds policy sets out what happens when a print arrives wrong.

We also publish guides on pet loss and remembrance, cited and not about our own product. If you would like to see what the portraits actually look like, start with dog portraits, cat portraits or memorial portraits, or go straight to uploading a photo.