Painted Letters

Their Hand, Kept

We lift the paper away and keep every stroke.

Only the ink leaves your phone, never the photograph.

Abraham Lincoln to Mary Todd Lincoln, 8 August 1863, from the Library of Congress. The paper lifted away, his hand as he wrote it, shown at 36 × 24 in.

The Hand, Then the Paper

Strokes the threshold leaves out are marked in red.

The example: Lincoln's letter of 8 August 1863.
The Note

Read here, on this device; the photograph is never sent. HEIC opens in Safari only: elsewhere, share it as a JPEG first.

Showing the example. Bring a photograph of your own note to see its hand here.

The Line Beneath
The Script

The line beneath is set in the script you choose. Your own hand stays exactly as written.

The Ink

Printed in

    Faint strokes keptFirm strokes only
    Trim the Edges

    Cut away a table edge or a shadow before the paper is lifted.

    The Ground
      The Sheet
        The Print
          The Size

            Ship To

            Stripe takes the payment, in US dollars. Shipping is charged at cost.

            How It Works

            Only the Ink Leaves

            Only the ink leaves your phone, never the photograph.

            Your photograph is opened, straightened and thresholded in this tab, on your device. When you order, the studio sends one thing: a mask of the strokes, one bit per pixel, under 800 KB. The photograph is never uploaded, never stored and never seen by us. Close the tab and it is gone.

            What Drops Out

            Strokes the threshold leaves out are marked in red.

            Pencil, faded ink and the dry tail of a pen can fall under the threshold. The studio marks them in red over the preview, so you see what the print will not carry before you pay for it. Slide toward faint strokes and most come back, with more of the paper's grain beside them.

            We will not redraw a stroke that is not there. The note is already the keepsake; the print adds nothing to it, not even our name.

            The Method

            Each pixel is judged against the paper around it.

            The threshold is Sauvola and Pietikäinen's (Pattern Recognition, 2000): every pixel is compared with the mean and spread of a 31 px window round it, so a shadow across the page or a yellowed corner falls away and the stroke stays. Specks under the size you set are cleared, the lines are turned level, and the hand is set with a 12% margin all round.

            At print size the mask is enlarged with its edges drawn at the half-way line, one pixel soft, so a stroke stays crisp. The studio refuses any size that would take the hand under 150 dpi.