Ray Martinez was born in Nyack and raised in Rockland County, spent the rest of his formative years in the Dominican Republic, Houston Texas, and finally in New York City, where he has spent the last 35 years and he currently resides.
Ray has over twenty five years of photo manipulation, design, technical expertise in software as well as hardware. An asset to any team, project, or company, Ray can also handle many projects on his own or help assemble a team.
When Ray was 21 years old, he was studying to be an electronic technician. He felt that this was his path, since math came naturally to him and computers were his main hobby (In the early days of the Texas Instruments TI 99 4/A and Commodore 64). Instead of taking notes on circuits and formulas, he realized that he was spending more time sketching on the side of his notebook, mostly ideas for logos and ads. It hit him… there was his passion! He decided to go for his dream and enrolled at the Center for the Media Arts in 1991, enrolling in an intensive course in typography, design, business graphics, and 3D design/animation, and graduated in 1992.
He furthered his knowledge at Lehman College and School of Visual Arts with courses in videography and multimedia. This experience, spending two years working at a very busy service bureau in Tribeca in New York City, plus a strong work ethic helped him to become the retouching manager at Macy’s. Later, he was the first hire at a leading photo studio in New York City, Pier 59. After a brief stint at Pier59 and color experience under his belt, he was called back to Macy’s to help bring the color work in-house.
He left Macy’s in December 1999, and worked on many projects, first as a freelancer, and then under his own company, M Media Services, a company formed to provide pre-media services for editorial, advertising and online companies. In 2007, Ray Martinez teamed up with photographer Mark Platt and former Elle creative director Guillaume Bruneau and formed M/G+R for high end photography and ShopStudioNYC for e-commerce photography. Much of the M/G+R work can be seen in the Conceptual portfolio on this site.
He returned to Macy’s in 2015 and is now the Lead Retoucher of Complex retouching and the Lead Retoucher of Tabletop packaging. He helped solidify the workflow and maintained the standards for new jobs, and trained other retouchers in handling the work. Ray has been one of the go-to retouchers for many of the front covers for catalogues that required a special touch.
