Retouching

Since 2019, Mode Imaging has worked on every Super Bowl commercial Google produced in-house through its Creative Lab studio in New York — six spots across eight years. The run: Codes (a.k.a. Job Search for Veterans, Super Bowl LIII, 2019), Loretta (Super Bowl LIV, 2020), Fixed on Pixel (Super Bowl LVII, 2023), Javier in Frame (2024), Dream Job (2025), and New Home (Super Bowl LX, 2026) — the Gemini spot that finished No. 1 in the Kellogg School's 22nd annual Super Bowl Advertising Review. Alongside the Super Bowl run: Pixel campaign work like the Pixel 8 Best Take commercial and Planning a Quick Getaway? Just Ask Google — the latter combining stills retouching with AI rendering — plus the 2018 Pixel 3 Top Shot launch commercial and other Google commercial, print, and digital projects.

For Codes (2019), Mode Imaging retouched the veterans' still photos and re-created photo-realistic renderings of the military forms whose MOS codes carry the spot — paper textures, typewriter type, stamps, and signatures built to survive full-screen close-up. The volume was enormous: what felt like thousands of frames produced, of which only a fraction aired. For Loretta (2020) — widely acclaimed and rated the most effective ad of Super Bowl LIV — the studio retouched every still photograph in the spot, and many more that never made the cut. For the 2024 Javier in Frame spot, Mode Imaging retouched every still photo in the commercial. For Fixed on Pixel (2023), the studio provided photo retouching and style consulting.

The work has to hold up in the most-watched advertising slot on television — and read as effortless, personal photography while doing it.

Positive Sum is Emerson Collective's annual magazine, and Mode Imaging has handled retouching and finishing across the full issue for every volume — every image, cover to cover. Contributing photographers deliver their own work; the studio's job is the pass that makes a volume whole — consistency across shoots, extensions where layouts demand them, and finishing that holds a single standard from the front cover to the last page.

One volume a year, every year since the first: the kind of long-running editorial relationship where the work is measured in whole publications, not single images.

For YouTube's global outdoor campaign, Mode Imaging retouched the photography across digital and outdoor placements — work that ran at transit-poster and billboard scale, where every decision is magnified.

Outdoor is unforgiving: files delivered at maximum resolution for placements measured in feet, with skin, type, and color that must survive both a phone screen and a forty-foot wall.

New York theater has kept the studio busy for years — retouching for Broadway show advertising, from Waitress to Moulin Rouge! The Musical, alongside Off-Broadway work like Second Stage's Days of Rage and New York institutions like the Big Apple Circus.

Theater advertising is image-led: one portrait or one piece of key art has to sell the whole show across print, outdoor, and digital. These pieces are a few from that run — and the CGI archive holds the dimensional side, with show logos modeled and rendered for Hamilton, Moulin Rouge, and Chess.

For the AKG N90Q — Harman's flagship headphone, inspired by Quincy Jones — Mode Imaging retouched and composited the campaign's key art: sepia portraits of Jones across his career, layered with handwritten scores and the gold Q of the headphone itself. The delivered files were enormous, built for outdoor billboards — artwork this textured has to hold every scratch and stave at building scale.

Three pieces from the campaign are in this gallery: the launch art, “Listen to Your Vision,” and the “Personalize Your Sound” banner.

Automotive retouching is its own discipline — paint, glass, and chrome reflect everything, and a car photographed in the real world never leaves the camera showroom-ready. Mode Imaging retouched campaign photography for BMW across a body of work that includes the 4 Series Gran Coupe and the i3.

These are a few images from a multi-year run of BMW retouching — years of campaign photography finished for print and digital, to the exacting standard automotive advertising demands.

The billboard above — the i3 at home on its charger — earned a 2015 Gold OBIE Award, outdoor advertising's annual honors, with agency kbs+. The award itself is pictured below.

Over many years and across multiple agencies, Mode Imaging retouched thousands of images for Victoria's Secret — a demanding client. Every image was prepared for large-format outdoor advertising, and the same files then ran across every other discipline the campaigns touched.

Outdoor-first is the hardest way to build a file: skin, product, and color finished to hold at billboard scale have nowhere to hide.