About

Elena Tsareva. Executive director Elena worked as a director of marketing for major retail chains for 17 years. Now she’s back to her roots and her true passion – design and art. Elena joined the studio in 2022, and has used her extensive experience to organize the team’s workflow with clients, advertising and production agencies.

Anastasia Derzhavina. Head of the retouching team Anastasia started her career as a photographer. In 2007, she began retouching commercial and art photography and was fascinated. By 2013, she had extensive experience in retouching, but decided to upgrade her skills by training with an Australian master of retouching. Since 2020, Anastasia has been training young retouchers and supervising team projects. She's been working with Paragon since it was founded in 2016. Currently, she supervises the retouching process and is in charge of the retouching quality as well as the training and development of the retouching team. Every single photo that the clients see has to be approved by her first.

Irina Balabanova. Project Manager Irina attended an arts school and has a BA in Law. Her analytical and systematic mind is a great asset in managing projects and meeting deadlines. Her background in art allows her to be on the same page with the team of retouchers and clients, to understand their needs and come up with the best approaches and solutions for everyone. Irina has been working with Paragon since 2020.

Roman Knertser. International client & project manager After receiving a BA degree in linguistics focused on English, Roman attended three schools of photojournalism and holds a masters degree in Photography from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in the US. Throughout his career, Roman has worked internationally as a photographer, videographer, multimedia and photo editor, and translator and taught photography for a year at Northern Arizona University. He joined Paragon in 2020 and has been managing international projects since. If you need help with a project or just want to chat about photography for hours, he is your guy.

Elena Lavrik. Project & assistant manager. Elena has been organizing photo shoots and post-production since 2010. At Paragon Retouch, she is in charge of product photography projects for catalogs and eCommerce. 

Anna Timushkina. Senior retoucher Trained as a film and TV director of photography, Anna has been working as a professional retoucher since 2008. She worked as a senior retoucher for a large retail chain for more than 5 years and has extensive experience in managing team projects. She also taught retouching at an online school. Anna is passionate about compositing scenes in the dark fantasy genre and is a fan of complex and challenging tasks. Her motto is “Anything’s possible. The impossible just takes more time”. She’s been with Paragon since 2020. 

Alexey Tsarev. Founder of Paragon Retouch In 2000s, Alexey worked as an assignment photographer for many publications. In 2007-2013, he taught photography and photojournalism, worked as a photo editor for a number of magazines and organized and curated photo exhibitions. In 2016, Alexey founded Paragon Retouch studio.