Headshot Photo Checker

The single biggest difference between a selfie and a source photo is distance. A phone lens held at arm's length is very close to your face, and at that range it widens the nose and jaw and pushes the ears back. It looks normal because you see it every day, but an AI model trained on those frames learns the distortion as your face.

Ask someone to take the photo from about 1.5 m or 5 ft, or prop the phone up and use the timer. If your phone has a 2x or 3x lens, use it. Then let the face fill roughly a fifth of the frame width or more. Standing further away and cropping later is fine, as long as the crop is still sharp.

Soft, even light from the front is what a studio does with big diffusers, and a window on an overcast day does it for free. Stand facing the window with the camera between you and the glass, so the light lands on your face and not behind you. Open shade outdoors works the same way.

Avoid overhead ceiling lights on their own, which put shadows under the eyes and nose, and avoid direct midday sun, which does the opposite and blows out the skin. If the checker says the frame is dark, move closer to the window or turn on a lamp in front of you rather than raising the phone's exposure.

Frame from the top of the head to just below the shoulders, with your face near the centre. Keep the camera at eye level: shooting from below adds chin and shooting from above shrinks the jaw, and neither survives into a good headshot.

Look straight at the lens or turn a quarter to one side. Keep hair off the face, take off sunglasses, and keep hands away from the chin. Plain backgrounds help, but the background matters far less than the face being large, sharp and lit.

Set the phone at eye level, face soft window light and use a timer or ask someone to take the photo from a step back. Our phone guide walks through the setup, angles and photo selection so you can collect a varied, clear set before starting your headshots.

• Follow the phone headshot guide

The four checks measure things a browser can measure: whether a face is present, how much fine detail survives, how bright the frame is, and how much of the width the face takes up. They do not judge expression, clothing, background clutter, filters, or whether the photo is recent and looks like you today.

The paid intake runs a stricter vision check on every photo and will turn down shots this tool passes, for example a face partly covered, a strong side angle, or heavy beauty smoothing. Treat a pass here as a good sign, not a promise. If the finished headshots fall short, every order has a full refund inside 7 days.