Why We Made Picturestudio
Why We Made Picturestudio
By Raul Gutierrez • January 30, 2025

As long as I can remember I’ve been obsessed with making images. As a kid I was constantly getting in trouble for drawing on things—on desks, on walls, on shoes—I was THAT kid.
When I was 7 or 8 I discovered my dad’s Pentax camera. This is the first picture I ever took.
This new tool opened up a world of creative possibilities. By high school I was the school yearbook and newspaper photographer and made thousands of images.
Then came computers. The first major program I wrote as a teen on my Mac shortly was a pixel editor for icons.
I began college as an engineer but graduated with a degree in art history, not because I didn’t love engineering, but because suddenly I was immersed in a world where I got to think about the hows and whys of image-making and I loved it. This led to an image-obsessed career. After working in the movie business, I moved to the startup world, where each venture was intimately tied to art in some way. This is a long way of saying: images are my jam.
In 2022, the AI world was on fire with innovation. The people making generative AI models—especially those producing images—were making breakthrough leaps that put these tools within reach of creative people everywhere. But these tools were often hard to use, or when they were easy to use, they often produced images that were hyper-stylized—they felt like the machine's images rather than your own.
This new territory and required fresh ways of thinking about creative tooling. Visual people like visual tools. Using only text was disorienting. Thinking about these ideas excited me so much that for months I could think of nothing else, and out of this passion, PictureStudio was born.
We founded PictureStudio with clear goals:
-Create tools anyone can use
-Give creative people a short path between idea and execution.
-Enable artists to work in their own style
-Protect creative people and their work
-Offer tools that give people many different ways to work.
-Remain independent of any single AI model
Over the past year, we've built a platform with these principles. Today, PictureStudio empowers you to run with ideas, harness the latest gen-ai advances, and create exciting work with remarkable speed. I use it every day to chase my imagination, to help me visualize projects, and to do real work, sometimes extending existing work, and sometimes starting fresh. For me it's like a camera or a pencil, a tool I can use to visualize the things in my head.




Now we're ready to open up the platform more widely and invite you to dive in and give it a try. We are ambitious—our current toolset is only the beginning; we’ll have much more coming in the months ahead. They are tools that in some ways remind me of writing on the walls as a kid—I can follow ideas wherever they lead me.
Most importantly we can't wait to see what you create. While I love using PictureStudio, my greatest pleasure has been seeing how it helps other people express themselves.
A key part of our mission is showcasing the work of artists using PictureStudio. If you've made something intriguing and would like to share your story, please reach out. We'd love to highlight amazing work.