An inversion technique has been developed to recover LTE one-dimensional model photospheres for late-type stars from very high-resolution high signal-to-noise stellar line profiles. It is successfully applied to the Sun using a set of unblended Ti 1, Ca 1, Cr 1 and Fe 1 lines with accurate transition probabilities. Temperature stratification, continuum flux, center-to-limb variation and wings of strong metal lines obtained from the resulting model are compared with those from other well-known theoretical and empirical solar models and show the reliability of the procedure.