Verified against Nano Banana / Gemini 3.1 Flash Image · 2026-07-28
Turn a casual selfie into a professional headshot without losing likeness
Upgrades attire, background, and lighting on an uploaded selfie for a LinkedIn-style headshot while explicitly locking facial identity — bone structure, skin texture, distinguishing features — so the result is still recognizably the same person, not a smoothed-over stand-in.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
You are converting a casual selfie into a professional headshot suitable for a LinkedIn profile or a company team page. The person's actual likeness must be preserved — this is a wardrobe, lighting, and background upgrade, not a face edit. SOURCE SELFIE a front-facing phone selfie taken at arm's length, indoor lighting, wearing a casual t-shirt, slightly looking up at the camera. IDENTITY PRESERVATION — HARD CONSTRAINT Preserve exactly: their bone structure, eye shape and color, nose and mouth shape, skin tone, any visible distinguishing features (moles, scars, freckles, asymmetries), and their actual skin texture. Do not smooth skin beyond removing genuinely temporary things like a stray flyaway hair or a piece of lint — do not slim the face, enlarge the eyes, or otherwise adjust proportions toward a generic "attractive" template. A colleague who knows this person should look at the result and immediately recognize them as the same person, not a flattering stranger who resembles them. ATTIRE AND GROOMING change the t-shirt to a simple charcoal button-down collar shirt; leave hair exactly as photographed. Apply only the changes listed — if grooming changes weren't requested, leave hair and any facial hair exactly as photographed. BACKGROUND AND LIGHTING STYLE a softly blurred neutral warm-grey background, even soft studio-style lighting with no harsh shadows. Replace the selfie's typical close-range phone-camera lighting and background with this professional treatment, using the same principle as a real headshot session: soft, even, flattering light with no harsh phone-flash shadows, and a background that doesn't compete with or distract from the subject. FRAMING head-and-shoulders crop, camera at eye level, straight-on angle rather than looking up. Reframe to this crop and angle even if the original selfie was framed differently — a selfie's typical slightly-above, arm's-length angle is rarely the most flattering headshot angle, and adjusting the apparent camera height and distance is part of this professional upgrade, as long as the face itself, once reframed, still reads as unmistakably the same person from this new angle. LENS CHARACTER Selfies are typically shot on a wide phone lens at close range, which subtly distorts facial proportions — the nose appears larger and the face rounder than it would at a normal headshot-photography distance. Correct for this specific distortion as part of the reframing, restoring the person's actual proportions as they'd appear at a normal 3-5 foot headshot distance on a longer lens — this is a distortion correction, not a proportion change, and should bring the result closer to their real appearance, not further from it. OUTPUT One professional headshot, same person, unmistakably recognizable, dressed and lit for the setting requested — plus a one-line note flagging anything in the identity-preservation list that was genuinely difficult to render confidently from the source selfie's resolution or angle.
Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
This prompt's identity-preservation list is written as a set of named, checkable features — bone structure, eye shape, specific distinguishing marks — rather than a single vague instruction like "keep it looking like them," because a model asked generically to "make a selfie more professional" has a well-documented drift toward beautification: subtly slimming a face, enlarging eyes, or smoothing skin texture toward a generic template, all changes that individually look like reasonable polish but that compound into a result a close colleague genuinely wouldn't recognize at a glance, which defeats the entire purpose of a headshot meant to represent a real, specific person on a professional profile. Second, the lens-distortion correction is a real, physically grounded detail worth naming explicitly rather than leaving implicit: a selfie shot at arm's length on a phone's wide-angle-adjacent lens measurably distorts facial proportions — the nose reads larger and the face rounder than the same person photographed from three to five feet away on a longer focal length, which is standard headshot-photography distance — so correcting for that specific, well-understood optical effect is genuinely restoring the person's real appearance, not altering it, and framing the instruction this way keeps the correction inside the bounds of the identity-preservation rule rather than contradicting it. Third, requiring the model to flag anything it found genuinely hard to render confidently from the source photo's resolution or angle turns an otherwise silent best-effort guess into a visible signal the requester can act on — a selfie shot at a steep upward angle may not clearly show certain features from the new, more level headshot angle, and knowing that a specific detail was a lower-confidence reconstruction is far more useful than a confident-looking headshot that quietly guessed wrong on something as significant as a distinguishing facial feature.
Verified against
Nano Banana / Gemini 3.1 Flash Image Gemini 3.1 Flash Image · 2026-07-28
Changelog
- 2026-07-28 — Initial publish, verified against Nano Banana (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) converting an arm's-length phone selfie into a studio-style headshot.
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