Photo retouching business policies

An outline of our privacy and business policies. This includes website privacy, what we do and don't do with your contact information, copyright issues, how we handle your photos, and electronic payments.

This web site uses cookies. Actually we use exactly one Google Analytics cookie which provides us with non-personal, aggregate information on how viewers use this site. But cookies are not required to browse this site.

There is no advertising and no affiliate links on this site. There are no advertiser cookies.

This site has a blog that may embed video from a third-party site like Youtube. These videos can have their own cookies which are covered by the privacy policies of those third-party sites. We use Youtube's special no-cookie embed links whenever possible.

Historical archive photos used on our blog are from government archives. These pictures are in the public domain and are captioned to show their source.

The blog may have product photos which come from the respective manufacturers.

This site may have photos copyrighted by other photographers. These images are used with their permission to show our retouching work on those photos. These images are marked with the photographer's copyright notice. No permission is granted for any reuse or redistribution of these photos.

All other photographs on this site are copyrighted by Warren Toda. No permission is granted for the reuse or redistribution of these photographs.

If you contact us through one of the forms on this site or by direct email, then your name, email address, phone number and any other information you provide will be kept by us and used to respond to your enquiry. Your contact information is not given to anyone else and will be deleted if no longer needed.

The information you enter into a contact form is not stored in any database. You will not be added to any email list.

Your contact information is used only to respond to your questions and to correspond with you about a specific project that we're doing for you.

If you make a purchase from us, (thank you very much), we keep a copy of the invoice for six years. This is required by Canada Revenue Agency.

Your contact information will not be used to solicit future business.

Some artificially-intelligent (AI) retouching tools require cloud-based processing. This means the photo is uploaded to the software company's servers for processing. These companies say their cloud services respect privacy and the photos will not be viewed by humans or used for anything else. It's well known that US software company Adobe scans uploaded images for "objectionable" content.

As good as AI tools are, we can, in most cases, use conventional retouch tools to get the same end results.

We do not keep any of your photos. After the final retouched photos have been sent to you, we delete our copies of your original photos and retouched photos.

It's important that you keep backup copies of your retouched photos. If a retouched photo is lost, full price will be charged to redo the retouching.

We do not claim any copyright in the retouching that we do for you.

Technical edits cannot be copyrighted but artistic work can be.

Technical edits include such things as adjusting brightness, contrast, colour and sharpness, fixing highlights and shadows, removing loose hairs, straightening crooked walls, adding images to display screens, fixing a crooked tie, etc.

Artistic edits might include creating a unique background, creating new clothes for someone, or creating a composite image from unique elements. Note the word "create."

All of our retouching to date would most likely be considered technical even though some artistic decisions are made. We don't foresee any situation where this would change.

Interac and Square are used for electronic payments by e-transfer and credit card respectively.

Interac payments are processed by your bank. Square payments are processed on its secure site. We do not receive any of your financial information.

This site's blog uses Wordpress software. If you submit a comment, you have to include your name, email address and, optionally, your web site url. This information will be stored on our server. Your name will be published alongside your comment and it will be linked to your web site url if provided. Your email address will not be published nor added to any mailing list.