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Reference photo guide

How to shoot the
perfect sample set.

Every render is built on the frames you give it. Ten minutes at a window with a phone will beat anything the model can do with six blurry night-out selfies. Here's the checklist a photographer would run before the shoot.

The 60-second version
  • 4–6 frames, all the same person, shot within the last year.
  • Face fills roughly a third of the frame, eyes sharp and open.
  • Soft, even light — a window at midday beats a ceiling downlight.
  • Vary angle and expression: front, three-quarter, neutral, smiling.
  • No sunglasses, heavy filters, hats, or other faces in the frame.
  • Straight out of the camera — no beauty filters, no heavy retouching.
01

Build the set, not the photo

The check reads your frames as a group. One brilliant photo with five throwaways still grades badly.

  • Four to six frames is the sweet spot — two is the minimum the check accepts.
  • Every frame must be the same person. Group shots confuse the likeness read.
  • Mix it up: one straight-on, one three-quarter, one slight profile, one full-length if you want body direction.
  • Include at least one neutral expression and one natural smile.
  • Keep them recent. Big changes in hair, weight or facial hair pull the render off-likeness.
  • Avoid six near-identical selfies from the same afternoon — that gives the model one angle to work from.
02

Light is the whole job

Almost every low grade we see is a lighting problem, not a camera problem.

  • Face a window with the light in front of you, not behind. Backlight turns your face into a silhouette.
  • Overcast daylight or open shade is the most forgiving light there is.
  • Avoid direct midday sun overhead — it drops hard shadows into the eye sockets.
  • Indoors at night, stand near one soft lamp rather than under a ceiling downlight.
  • Watch for colour casts: green office fluorescents and warm bedside lamps both skew skin tone.
  • No on-camera flash. It flattens the face and blows out the highlights.
03

Framing and distance

The model needs pixels on your face — give it some.

  • Your head and shoulders should fill about a third of the frame.
  • Hold the camera at eye level. Shooting from below adds a chin; from above shrinks the jaw.
  • Step back and zoom slightly rather than pushing the phone close — it stops lens distortion on the nose.
  • Keep the background simple and a little separated from you. Busy patterns bleed into the render.
  • Leave a small gap above your head; don't crop the top of the skull.
04

Technical quality

The check grades sharpness and exposure per frame and tells you which one is dragging the set down.

  • Use the rear camera if you can — it's sharper than the selfie camera on almost every phone.
  • Tap to focus on the eyes before you shoot, and brace your elbows to kill motion blur.
  • Shoot in decent resolution, but don't stress: uploads are resized in your browser before they're sent.
  • Upload JPEG, PNG or WebP. Screenshots of photos lose detail — use the original file.
  • Turn off beauty modes, skin smoothing and app filters. They erase the detail the likeness read depends on.
05

Wardrobe and styling

You're giving the model raw material for identity, not for outfits — the brief handles wardrobe.

  • Plain, solid-colour tops read best. Loud logos and stripes can leak into the render.
  • Keep glasses consistent: either wear them in most frames or none. Half-and-half confuses the set.
  • No sunglasses, no hats pulled low, no hands covering the face.
  • Hair off the face in at least two frames so the jaw and hairline are readable.
  • If you always wear a certain look, include it — that's what the render will learn.
06

Getting more from the brief

Good references plus a specific direction beat good references alone.

  • Start from a pack, then edit the direction in plain English — it's faster than writing from scratch.
  • Name the light you want: 'soft window key from camera-left, deep falloff' works better than 'nice lighting'.
  • Say where it is and what it's for: 'seated at a dark timber desk, LinkedIn header crop'.
  • Change one thing at a time between renders so you can tell what actually helped.
  • If a render drifts off-likeness, fix the reference set first — re-rolling rarely rescues weak references.
Fix these first

The five sets we see fail.

Six selfies from the same angle
Four frames from different angles and two different days
Backlit against a bright window
Turned around so the window lights your face
Beauty filter left on
Raw camera photo, no smoothing
Full-body shot where your face is 40px wide
Head-and-shoulders crop with sharp eyes
Group photo cropped down to you
A photo where you were the subject

Got your six frames?

Run them through the set check first — it grades every frame and names the one dragging the set down before you spend a generation.

Open the studio