AI Prompts for Professional Headshots

What a usable headshot needs

A professional headshot has one job: show a stranger what you look like, clearly, before they meet you. That's why the good ones look so alike. A photographer settles the same five things every time, and a prompt that turns your selfie into a headshot has to settle them too, on top of keeping your face.

1. Framing. Chest up or a little tighter, face toward the camera, eyes in the upper third of the frame and some room above the hair. A square or 4:5 crop survives every profile circle and company page.
2. Background. Plain, out of focus and a few shades away from your hair and clothes so you don't melt into it. Gray, off-white, a soft color or a blurred room. Nothing with a logo or readable writing.
3. Light. One large soft source to one side of the camera, some fill on the other, and a small catchlight in each eye. Hard overhead light gives you shadows under the eyes and nose, which is what makes most selfies look tired.
4. Clothing. Solid colors that fit, in the register of your field: a suit for a bank, a plain sweater for a design studio. Busy patterns and big logos pull the eye off your face.
5. Expression. Eyes to the lens, shoulders relaxed, a closed-mouth smile or a calm neutral look. Approachable beats intense for almost any work profile.

Add the hold line in front of those five and you have the whole request. Here it is in a form you can type from memory:

Use the attached selfie. Keep my face, skin tone, hair, glasses
and body exactly as they are. No retouching, keep natural skin texture.
A headshot from the chest up, in [clothes], against [plain background].
Soft light from the front [left], gentle fill on the right,
catchlights in both eyes. [Expression], eyes to the lens.
85mm look, aspect ratio [1:1 or 4:5]. No text, no watermark.

The «no retouching» line matters as much as the hold line. Without it, the model is free to smooth your skin, and smooth skin is the first thing that makes a headshot look generated.

Which prompt for which profile

Every block on this page fills in the pattern above for one kind of work. Pick by where the picture will be seen.

One request, before and after

This is the request people usually start with. We wrote it and the improved version to show the method; neither one came from a model.

make me a professional headshot for linkedin

Read it from the model's side. «Professional» could mean a suit or a sweater, a studio or an office. Nothing protects your face, so the model is free to tidy it, and nothing says how much of you should be in the frame. Here is the same request with every decision made:

Use the attached selfie. Keep my face, skin tone, hair, glasses
and body exactly as they are. Do not smooth, reshape or whiten
anything; keep pores, lines and the small asymmetries of my face.
A headshot from the chest up in a plain charcoal sweater over a white
collared shirt, against a smooth pale blue-gray backdrop. One large
softbox from the front left, a reflector on the right, catchlights
in both eyes. Shoulders turned slightly, face to the camera, relaxed
closed-mouth smile. 85mm look at f/4, eyes sharp, aspect ratio 1:1.
No text, no watermark.

«Small asymmetries» is the line most people leave out. Real faces aren't symmetrical, and a model that evens yours out produces someone who looks like your cousin. «Whiten» is named because teeth are easy for a model to redraw. The pale blue-gray separates dark hair from the backdrop, and the square crop fits a profile circle without losing your chin.

Follow-up lines that fix a headshot

Stay in the same chat and fix one thing per reply. If the face has already drifted, go back to the original selfie first.

Where AI headshots go wrong

A generated headshot can look polished and still be wrong in small ways that the people who know you notice. Check these before you upload one anywhere.

• Skin smoothing. Pores and lines disappear, and the face takes on a waxy, even sheen. It's the clearest tell, and it also makes you look a few years younger than you'll look on a video call.
• Features that move. A slightly narrower nose, a firmer jaw, eyes a touch further apart. Each change is small, and together they make a stranger. Put the result next to your selfie at the same size and look at one feature at a time.
• Ears and teeth. They're often hidden or blurry in a selfie, so the model draws its own: ears that don't match each other, an earring you don't own, a row of perfectly even white teeth.
• Hair and glasses. Hairlines get tidier, gray gets darker, flyaways vanish, frames change shape or disappear. If you wear glasses every day, a headshot without them isn't how people know you.
• A bad source. A dim, filtered or wide-angle selfie leaves the model guessing, and it guesses toward an average face. A better selfie fixes more than a better prompt.

The quickest check is a person. Show the result to someone who sees you every week and ask what's different. They'll spot in seconds what you've stopped seeing after twenty regenerations.

When an AI headshot is the wrong choice

These prompts keep your face and change the setting, which is fine for a lot of profiles. Some places expect a photograph of how you actually look, and a generated image is the wrong thing to give them.

• Official documents. Passports, visas, driver's licenses and work badges are issued against a real photo taken to the issuer's own rules. Don't submit an edited or generated picture; get a photo taken to their spec.
• Casting and modeling. A casting headshot exists to show exactly what walks into the room. Use the Actor Headshot Soft Light to plan the look and the light, then book a real shoot.
• Anywhere a match is checked. Identity checks, security systems, and events where a badge photo is compared with your face at the door.
• A workplace with its own rules. Some employers want every team photo from the company photographer, or forbid generated images on official pages. Ask first.

Platforms set their own terms as well. LinkedIn's Professional Community Policies, as of October 2026, say not to use an image of someone else or any other image that isn't your likeness for your profile photo. A headshot built on your own face, unretouched, is the safe side of that line. One where the features have drifted is the risky side, which is one more reason to check the result against your selfie before you post it.

For a portrait made from nothing, with no face to keep, the AI photo prompts page builds editorial portraits from a written brief. For a picture of the two of you, see the couple photo prompts.