Photo Illustration & Compositing in Omaha
For twenty years I’ve been building the kind of images you can’t just shoot — composites, photo illustrations, and advanced retouching for advertising campaigns, product imagery, and editorial features. I cut my teeth in the Chicago ad world with shops like Leo Burnett, Publicis, FCB, and DDB, producing work for McDonald’s, Disney, Burger King, Morton Salt, Crate & Barrel, and Crain’s Chicago Business. That craft transferred directly to Omaha, where local agencies and marketing teams use the same toolkit for brand campaigns, product launches, and national-caliber visuals without flying talent in from a coast.
Every project starts with real photography — real light, real subjects, real textures. From there, I layer in compositing, retouching, and AI-assisted tools where they’re actually useful: faster iteration on backgrounds, cleaner cutouts, and room to explore more creative directions before the deadline. The goal is always the same — images that look considered, not cobbled together.
What this actually looks like
Compositing
Merging multiple shots — subject, background, props, light sources — into a single cohesive image. Useful when the scene can’t be staged in one frame: an executive on location you can’t access, a product in an environment that doesn’t exist yet, or a campaign concept that pulls elements from three different shoots into one hero image.
Advanced retouching
Beyond the basics. Skin and wardrobe repair, color matching across a team shoot, removing reflections and logo issues, rebuilding backgrounds, and the kind of painstaking work that keeps a final image looking natural instead of over-processed. Headshot-level retouching is covered on the Headshot Retouching page — this is for the larger production work.
Product & commercial imagery
Hero shots built for web, print, and out-of-home. Food, beverage, packaging, and prop-styled product photography, finished to agency standards. I shoot in-studio and on location in Omaha, and the retouching is done in-house rather than handed to an offshore team.
Photography + AI, used responsibly
AI tools are useful for generating backgrounds, extending scenes, or speeding up selections — but they don’t replace the photography. I use them the same way I’ve always used Photoshop: as part of a larger workflow, with the real image as the foundation. Clients get images that look human-made because they are, with AI doing the grunt work in the background.