Guides · 3 min read
Which photo works best
The best source photograph for a family portrait is an ordinary one where every face is clearly visible and reasonably lit. Composition, background, clothing and posing do not matter — all of that gets replaced. What cannot be replaced is a face the process cannot see.
The four things that actually matter
Every face visible and facing roughly toward the camera. A face in profile can be converted; a face turned away cannot. If someone is looking at a child instead of the lens, that photograph will not work, however lovely it is.
Light on the faces, not behind them. Backlighting produces silhouettes. A face against a bright window or a sunset has no detail to work from. Overcast daylight is close to ideal; direct midday sun is the worst common case, because it puts hard shadows in the eye sockets.
Two to six people. Below two there is no stack. Above six the people at the back become unrecognisable.
Enough resolution. A face needs to be a few hundred pixels across. A photo of twenty people taken from thirty feet away has faces forty pixels wide, and there is nothing there to preserve.
What genuinely does not matter
People overthink this. None of the following affects the result:
- The background. It is replaced entirely with black.
- What anyone is wearing, or whether it coordinates.
- Where people are standing, or how they are arranged.
- Whether the photo is well composed.
- Whether it is old. A photograph from 2009 works fine.
- Moderate grain, moderate blur, or a slight camera shake.
The best source photographs are usually ones nobody thought were good. The gap between an ordinary snapshot and a studio portrait is the product; a source that already looks professional produces an unimpressive result.
Defects you cannot recover from
| Defect | Why it cannot be fixed |
|---|---|
| A face turned away | Nothing to preserve |
| Sunglasses | The eyes are the portrait |
| A face in deep shadow | No detail to convert |
| Motion blur across a face | Features are not there to recover |
| A face partly behind someone | Cannot reconstruct what is hidden |
| More than six people | The stack stops being readable |
Photos that work better than people expect
Group photos from events. Wedding receptions, birthdays, graduations. People are usually looking at the camera and reasonably lit.
Slightly awkward posed shots. The stiff one where everyone is lined up and nobody is quite smiling — the stiffness comes from the arrangement, and the arrangement is exactly what gets replaced.
Old digital photos. A 2011 point-and-shoot photograph at 8 megapixels has more usable face detail than a modern phone photo taken from too far away.
Photos with a bad background. A cluttered kitchen or a car park behind you is irrelevant. It is going to be black.
A quick test
Before uploading, open the photograph and zoom to 100% on each face in turn. If you can see the shape of every person's eyes, the photo will work. If you cannot, no amount of processing will invent them.