A professional headshot from a snapshot
Turn a phone snapshot into a studio-style headshot for LinkedIn, a CV or a team page — which photo to start from, the three looks, and what to check before you use it.
A headshot is the photo on your LinkedIn profile, your CV, a conference badge or your company’s team page. Most of us don’t have a good one, and booking a photographer for one picture is a lot. Headshot starts from a photo you already have — a snapshot from your phone, a picture a friend took — and makes a studio-style portrait of you: framed head and shoulders, in soft light against a plain mid-grey backdrop, dressed for work.
Every result on this page came from Headshot as it runs today. Drag the divider to compare.
business look. The snapshot is an AI-generated picture.Make one in the web app
- Open Headshot in the web app. A workspace opens in your browser; there is nothing to sign up for.
- Drop your photo on the page, or press Choose file. A photo straight off your phone is fine, an iPhone’s HEIC included.
- Leave attire on
businessfor a jacket, or pick one of the other looks below. - Press Run. Your headshot appears over your photo with a slider between the two: drag it to compare, then press Download to keep it.
It’s free on our community queue, with no account or card needed, though at busy times your job waits its turn. If you hold credits or a subscription, it runs on our paid compute instead, at the price on Headshot’s card in the app. Sign in if you want to keep your history beyond this browser.
Start from the right photo
The photo you start from is the biggest choice you make. Headshot works from your face, and
keeps your hair, your skin tone and the angle of your head. It replaces the background, the
light and — with business — your clothes, and it takes away sunglasses, hats and anything
held in front of your face. On the lawn above, her earrings stayed; the necklace and the
backpack went with the sweater.
- Face the camera, with both eyes showing. A face turned well away from the camera, or mostly covered, isn’t found. The job stops with a message saying so, and you aren’t charged.
- Not too far away. A face that is very small in the frame isn’t found either, and a close, sharp photo gives Headshot more of your face to work from than a distant one.
- On your own, or the biggest face in the picture. In a group photo, Headshot uses the largest face. If that isn’t yours, crop the photo to yourself first.
- Wearing the expression you want. Your expression carries over, though not always exactly: both students kept their smiles in their business headshots, while the woman’s open smile came back closed when she became a starship captain, below.
- A busy background and mixed light are fine. Both are replaced: the lawn photo was taken in low sun among trees, and the one below at dusk in front of a lit glass building.
business look. The snapshot is an AI-generated picture.The three looks
The attire setting chooses what you’re wearing and where you are:
business, the default, dresses you in a dark jacket over a plain shirt. It’s the look for LinkedIn, a CV or a team page, and the other examples on this page use it.as-iskeeps the clothes you have on in the photo, and still gives you a headshot’s backdrop, light and framing. Choose it when a jacket isn’t how you dress for work.starship-captainis for fun: a dark, high-collared uniform on the bridge of a starship, with pointed ears and upswept eyebrows. Your hairstyle, facial hair, age and face shape stay yours. Not one for the CV.
attire: starship-captain and the default seed. The snapshot is an AI-generated picture.Her hair, her eyes and the shape of her face came through. Her open smile came back closed, and her earrings went with her ears.
Check that it looks like you
A headshot is a new picture made from your photo, not your photo retouched. The backdrop, the light and the clothes are new, and your face is drawn again in that new light. It is drawn to look like you, and it is a close likeness rather than an exact one, so look at it before you use it: your eyes, your teeth, the shape of your nose and jaw, a mole or a scar. Better still, show it to someone who knows your face.
Where your photo doesn’t show something, Headshot draws it. The oranges hid this woman’s eyes, so the eyes in her headshot are invented — blue, which hers may not be — and her tongue-out grin came back as an ordinary smile. Her photo was a 256 × 256 thumbnail, and the headshot still came back at full size; what it could not do was see her eyes. Start from a photo that shows yours.
seed: 7 and the default business look.Not quite you? Try another seed. The seed setting picks one headshot out of the many Headshot could make from the same photo. The same photo and seed always give the same headshot, and a different seed gives a different one. Press Random beside it and then Run again, and compare. The default seed is 42; the headshot above used 7. If a few seeds don’t get there, try a different photo — a closer one, or one with your face more square to the camera.
Using your headshot
- Size. It comes back as a 4:5 portrait, 832 × 1040 pixels, with your eyes a little above the middle. That’s plenty for a profile photo, a CV or a team page; printed at 300 dpi it is about 7 × 9 cm (2.8 × 3.5 in).
- Format. It comes back in the format you sent — a JPEG for a JPEG, a PNG for a PNG — and as a JPEG for a photo from an iPhone. output format asks for another.
- It isn’t an ID photo. A passport, a driving licence or a security badge needs an unedited photograph, and our terms say a result must not be used to identify anyone.
- For a team page, ask first. Making headshots for colleagues is a good use of it; ask each person before you upload their photo. It’s their face.
From your own code
Making headshots for a whole team, or inside your own app? Headshot is on the API as
cv-headshot-v1. With the Python client:
from craterview import CraterView
cv = CraterView(api_key="cv_...")
job = cv.run("me.jpg", model="cv-headshot-v1", attire="as-is")
job.save("me-headshot.jpg")
Below every run in the web app, Equivalent API calls shows the same request in curl, Python
and TypeScript, ready to copy. Your first API call walks through
getting a key and what happens under cv.run.
Try it on your own file
No signup and no card — a workspace opens for your browser the moment you do.
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