Professional Headshot with Your Phone: Lighting, Framing, and Cropping

What makes a professional headshot

It’s not the camera. A headshot looks professional when your face is well lit and in focus, you’re framed from the chest up, the background isn’t distracting, and your expression looks natural. You can get all of that with any decent phone, at home, in just 15 minutes.

Keep in mind that your photo will appear small and, in most places, be cropped into a circle—in LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Gmail, and company systems. Your face needs to look good at that size.

Lighting: Make a window your studio

• Stand facing a window, one or two steps away, in indirect daylight (not with direct sun hitting your face).
• Avoid overhead lighting, which creates shadows under your eyes, and never stand with your back to the window—it will leave your face dark.
• Cloudy days are ideal: the light is soft and even.
• If one side of your face looks too dark, hold a sheet of white paper or white cardboard on the side opposite the window to reflect light and soften the shadow.
• Turn off the flash.

Framing and camera setup

• Height: Keep the camera at eye level or slightly above. Shooting from below is rarely flattering.
• Distance: Ask someone to take the photo from three to six feet away, using a little zoom (2x, if your phone has it). A selfie with your arm outstretched can distort your face, making your nose look bigger and your ears smaller.
• No one to help? Prop your phone on a stack of books and use the camera timer.
• Portrait mode: It blurs the background and makes your face stand out. Check the edges of your hair, where artificial blur sometimes gets it wrong.
• Background: Choose a plain, light or neutral-colored wall, or a tidy, softly blurred room. Avoid bathroom doors, laundry on a clothesline, or a messy kitchen.
• Focus: Tap your eyes on the screen before taking the photo.

Take several photos, changing your face angle and expression slightly. The best shot is often one with a subtle smile, your shoulders turned slightly, and your face toward the camera.

What to wear and how to pose

• Wear what you’d choose for an important workday in your field. Solid colors work better than tiny patterns, which can appear to shimmer on screen.
• Avoid wearing the same color as the background (like a white shirt against a white wall).
• To relax your expression, take a deep breath and say something between shots. A forced smile shows.
• Glasses are fine. If there’s glare on the lenses, tilt your face slightly downward.

Final adjustments and cropping

1. Lighting: If the photo is a little dark, use Adjust brightness and contrast. Small changes are enough: raise the brightness and contrast slightly. Overdoing it can make your skin look unnatural.
2. Framing: Crop the photo into a square with Crop image. Make your face fill a good part of the frame, with your eyes roughly in the upper third.
3. Circle crop: Round profile picture crops your photo into a circle, lets you zoom and center your face by dragging, adds a colored border, and lets you choose the final size: 400 × 400 for email signatures, 800 × 800 for social media, or 1080 × 1080 for high resolution.

Even on platforms that crop photos automatically, uploading an already centered image helps keep the app from cutting off the top of your head or your chin.

Use the same photo everywhere

Using the same photo on LinkedIn, your work messaging app, email, and internal systems helps people recognize you. Save both the square and circular versions in an easy-to-find folder, and update them all at once when you change your photo. A photo that's several years old and looks very different from how you look now no longer serves its purpose.

Frequently asked questions