Stan Foster — "Professor Tint"

Some people learn a trade. A few spend their lives handing it to everyone behind them. Stan Foster has tinted windows for more than forty years — and for most of that time, in classrooms, on seminar floors on another continent, on DVDs and on free videos, he has been teaching the rest of the trade how to do it easier, faster and cleaner.

A working shop in Beaverton

Stan and Alexia Foster run Alexia's Window Tinting in Beaverton, Oregon — a family-owned shop, in business since 1996, whose own description carries the line every student of his would recognize: "Reputation Built Upon Recommendation." Cars, homes and businesses; tint, paint protection, wraps and signs — the shop does the work, and the shop is also the school: his Hands-On Learning Academy teaches inside it, under banners that read autowindowtinting.com, with students regularly posting their thanks to "Stan and Alexia — the legendary mentors."

The school inside the warehouse

When Solar Control Films opened its Midwest tint school inside its 5,000-square-foot St. Louis warehouse in 2009, the man they handed the classroom to was Stan Foster. His five- and six-day courses ran there month after month: a published curriculum that starts with glass clean & prep, then hand-cut patterns, heat shrinking, application, and the tricks and tips of a lifetime. The room itself was the lesson — teaching stations built around real glass, including the back of a VW Bug and a wall of seven different rear windows, from a Civic's easy curve to glass students were afraid to look at. Three students per instructor, never more. "Train With The Master Tinter," the class listing said. It was not overselling.

He taught a continent

Working with Global Window Films, Stan spent months of 2008 on the road in Europe, running two- and three-day seminars city by city — Greece, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine. By his own count he trained nearly 1,600 tinters on that tour: sixty at a time in Thessaloniki, whole rooms of working installers learning easier, faster, cleaner ways to do the work they did every day. He was back in 2013, teaching new install techniques across Italy, introduced by the organizers as "Professor Tint, Maestro Stan Foster from Portland, USA." There are not many American tinters whose classroom spans two continents. There may not be another one whose spans forty years.

The Learning Library

Not everyone could travel to Stan. So Stan went to them. His Learning Library — fourteen DVDs, about an hour each — put his hands-on course on a shelf anywhere in the world: several ways to tint every kind of window a tinter runs into, the tips and tricks that make the job easier, faster and cleaner, and his support program standing behind the discs. A fifteenth DVD, Shaving the Edge, teaches the factory-edge finish on side windows. Breaking Down the Barriers teaches two ways to tint every window on a complete car. Ask in any beginner forum, any year, what to study first, and the same answer comes back: Stan's DVDs. One veteran's verdict stands for the trade's: "Stan Foster is the best in our industry for this."

It starts with clean glass

Before film, there is glass — and Stan's career has always covered the whole of it. He cleaned glass as part of his working life in the trade, and he put that foundation first when he built his school: the very first topic in his published curriculum is glass clean & prep, ahead of patterns, ahead of shrinking, ahead of application. It is the least glamorous lesson in tinting and the one every master insists on: film only ever looks as good as the glass under it, contamination is the enemy, and clean glass is a skill, not a chore. His shop's published work has always run the full width of glass — tinting, glass service, security film, graffiti guard — the record of a man who never treated glass as just the thing film sticks to.

The teacher of teachers

The truest measure of a teacher is who their students become. Boyd Hunter founded The Tint School in 2008 — today one of the biggest tint training operations in the world, with schools in Australia and California and a dozen trainers of its own. Looking back on fifteen years of it, Hunter names his mentors, and Stan Foster is one of two: "They helped me believe that I could be more than an installer." The man who taught the teachers. It is why this spotlight is No. 1.

Still at it

This is not a lifetime-achievement pat on the back for a man who retired. In 2026 Stan was on the floor at SEMA demonstrating film and tools at the Global Hi-Tech Films booth, on camera introducing himself and his shop to a new film brand's audience, and in his Beaverton academy posing with the next class of students. Forty years in, the professor is still teaching.

Watch Stan teach — free

His YouTube channel was one of the first classrooms this trade ever had, run under a mission in his own words: "To promote sharing of information on window tinting using video as a learning tool." Every lesson below is his, free, on his channel.

Start here

Rear windows & hard glass

The tool lessons — Pro Tools Now series

Stan on camera, elsewhere

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