🧑💼 How to make a professional AI headshot
A great headshot used to cost hundreds and a half-day of your life. Today, one selfie and a well-written prompt ship a LinkedIn-ready portrait in minutes.
Pick the right reference photo
Use a well-lit, front-facing photo where your face fills the frame, eyes open, mouth relaxed. Natural window light beats harsh phone flash. Avoid heavy sunglasses, hats or extreme angles — the AI inherits every quirk of the input.
Use an edit model, not text-to-image
Text-to-image will invent a new face. Edit models (Nano Banana 2 edit, Flux Kontext, Seedream 4.5 edit) keep YOUR face and only swap wardrobe, background and lighting. That is the difference between a portrait and a stranger.
The headshot prompt formula
'Corporate LinkedIn headshot, dark navy blazer over white shirt, neutral grey seamless background, soft two-point studio lighting, 85mm f/2, editorial retouching, sharp eyes, natural skin texture.' Keep the face, change the world around it.
Generate a set, not one shot
Lock the seed and generate a five-shot mini-series: standard corporate, creative editorial, softer environmental, black-and-white, and a warmer casual. One brief, five deliverables ready for any platform.
Frequently asked
Yes. AI-assisted portraits are widely accepted as long as the person in the image is really you.
No. A well-lit smartphone selfie is enough for a modern edit model.
Ready to put this into practice?
Open the studio and apply what you just learned in under a minute.
Make your AI headshot