Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: BetterPic sells one of the options mentioned here. Figures are vendors' published numbers as of 2 September 2026. Almost every guide to professional photographs says the same thing: competence first, warmth second. For therapists, counsellors and psychologists that order is reversed, and following the standard advice produces a photograph that works against you. What a prospective client is doing when they look at your photographSome

Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: BetterPic sells one of the options mentioned here. Vendor figures are their own published numbers as of 2 September 2026, including where BetterPic is the weaker choice. Most guidance about professional headshots for women is about clothing, and a fair amount of it optimises for being liked rather than for being read as competent. Those are different goals and the second one is what the photograph is usually for. Here is the version

Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: BetterPic sells AI-generated portraits, and for most actor headshots they are not what you want. This piece says where the line is, because sending the wrong thing to a casting director costs you more than the price of a shoot. Actor headshots follow rules that contradict almost every piece of professional-photography advice. The conventions that serve a lawyer or a doctor actively harm a performer, and the reason is that a casting h

Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: BetterPic sells one of the options mentioned here. The conventions below are observable on any hospital directory or law firm people page; the vendor figures are published numbers as of 2 September 2026. Generic advice about professional photographs assumes the reader is being assessed on likeability. In medicine and law they are not, and the two fields pull in opposite directions from there. What a patient is doing when they look at

Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: we sell a generated alternative to this. This guide is the version that costs you nothing, because for a lot of people it is the right answer and the honest thing is to say so. The phone is not the limiting factor. Three other things are, in this order, and none of them costs anything to fix. One: the lens, not the cameraUse the telephoto lens, not the default wide one. The wide lens distorts faces at portrait distance — it widens th

Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: BetterPic sells one of the options discussed here. Vendor figures are their own published numbers as of 2 September 2026, including the two where BetterPic is the weaker choice. A business headshot has one job that a portrait does not: it has to survive being seen next to strangers, at small sizes, by someone deciding whether to reply to your email. Most advice about business headshots optimises for how the photograph looks on its ow

Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: BetterPic sells one of the tools mentioned here. Vendor figures are their own published numbers, checked on 2 September 2026, and the places where BetterPic is the weaker option are marked. Real estate is one of the few professions where the same headshot has to work at wildly different sizes on the same week: a yard sign seen from a moving car, a business card held at arm's length, and a circular thumbnail in a listing portal. Most

Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: BetterPic makes one of the tools mentioned below. Figures are each vendor's published numbers as of 2 September 2026. Almost every guide to LinkedIn profile pictures optimises for how the photo looks at full size. That is the one context in which it is almost never seen. The sizes that actually matterLinkedIn renders your profile photo at 400 x 400 pixels on your profile, and at most 800 x 800 when someone clicks it. In the feed, in

Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: BetterPic sells one of the tools discussed here. Vendor figures are their own published numbers, checked on 2 September 2026, including the two where BetterPic is the weaker choice. Booking a photographer for one person is a straightforward purchase. Doing it for a whole company is a logistics problem wearing a photography costume, and most of the advice written about corporate headshots quietly assumes the first situation while bein

Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: BetterPic is one of the tools covered here. Every figure is the vendor's own published number, checked on 1 September 2026, and the places where BetterPic is the weaker option are marked. Search for a free AI headshot generator and the results are misleading, because "free" is doing three completely different jobs in that sentence. Sorting out which one you actually want takes about a minute and saves you from the usual outcome, whic