How to take selfies that make good AI headshots

The photos you send are the identity reference for every headshot that comes back. They're where your face, your skin tone, your hair, and the shape of your features come from — the software supplies the suit, the studio, and the light, but it takes you from the pictures. That's why two people can order the same thing on the same day and get results of very different quality.

It's also the honest reason we can't promise a great outcome from a weak set of uploads. Nothing about this process makes your reference photos stop counting, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling harder than we are. So this is the part worth spending ten minutes on — it's the one variable entirely in your hands.

The single most common mistake is uploading a burst of photos from one moment: same room, same light, same shirt, same expression, ten frames apart. To you those are ten photos. As a reference set they're closer to one, because everything that distinguishes them is noise rather than information about your face.

What you want is the opposite — the same face under conditions that keep changing. Different days. Different tops. Daylight in some, indoor light in others. Head straight on in a few, turned slightly in others. Smiling in some, neutral in others. Every variation gives another angle on what stays constant about you, and what stays constant about you is exactly what needs to survive into the result.

The practical version: rather than staging a shoot, go through your camera roll from the last year and pick the ones that are already varied. Most people have plenty. The set you assemble in fifteen minutes from photos that already exist is usually better than the set you take in one sitting.

Every item here does the same underlying thing: it removes information about your face, which is the one job the reference photos have. A photo you'd happily post somewhere else can still be a poor reference, so judge these on what they show rather than on whether you like them:

Three is the floor and twenty is the ceiling. Somewhere between eight and twelve genuinely varied photos is the point where most people stop seeing improvement — past that you're mostly adding more of what you've already given.

More is not automatically better, and it's actively worse if the extras are weak. Twelve good photos beat twenty where the last eight are dim, filtered, or from a different year. If you're deciding whether to include a marginal one, leave it out.

Be consistent, because this is the detail that most often produces a mixed set of results. If you wear glasses every day, make sure the clear majority of your uploads have them on. If you only wear them sometimes, decide which version of yourself you want the headshot to show, and send photos that mostly match it.

A set that's half with and half without gives ambiguous instructions, and you'll get a gallery that's split too. The same applies to a beard you're mid-way through growing, or hair you've recently cut short: pick the version that matches how you look now and how you'll look for the next year.

Taking fresh photos is fine, and takes about ten minutes — but the goal is the opposite of taking a profile picture. When you shoot a profile photo you're chasing one perfect frame. Here you want a spread: move around the room, change your top, shoot some by a window and some further back, vary your expression from neutral to a real smile across the set.

The mechanics of a good individual frame are worth knowing anyway, and they're the same either way: window light rather than a ceiling fixture, the camera at eye level, a couple of metres back rather than at arm's length. Our phone-selfie comparison walks through that method in full, including the case where a well-taken phone photo is all you actually needed.

It's worth knowing the failure mode so you can recognise it. Poor reference photos rarely produce something obviously broken; they produce something subtly off — a face that's plausible and professional and not quite you. Softened features, an averaged-out version of your bone structure, a person a colleague would describe as looking a bit like you.

That's the outcome worth avoiding, because it's the one that fails the only test that matters when you walk into the meeting. Whether AI headshots look real goes through the rest of the tells in detail, and most of them trace back to what was uploaded.

You don't have to take any of this on faith. The free preview creates one finished headshot from your uploads in about a minute, with no card and no account, which means you can judge your own reference set on the result rather than on advice. If the preview doesn't look like you, the fix is almost always the uploads: swap in more varied, more recent, less filtered photos and look again.

That's the loop worth running once before spending anything. It costs nothing, it takes a couple of minutes, and it converts every guideline on this page into something you can actually see.