Show HN: Professional headshots for remote team with AI | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Professional headshots for remote team with AI

headshotpro.com

138 pointsdannypostma123 comments

I follow you and Pieter Levels on twitter. Some wild things you guys create -- the control net things are unreal. I am continually impressed and inspired.

If you're looking for critiques or improvements stating "Indistinguishable from real photos" seems a stretch as good as they are. Even if I were to use ai photos, I'd never try to pass them off as real. Seems dishonest. I'd push more towards a new thing, not sell as replacement for proper headshots. In that way, I'd think stylized things would do better, ie make it a piece of art. But also I'm def not target customer and you already seem to be doing quite well. Good on you for building so much.

> I'd never try to pass them off as real. Seems dishonest

With photo-shopping, makeup, plastic surgery... AI generated photos are ethical.

> With photo-shopping, makeup, plastic surgery... AI generated photos are ethical.

Correction: are just as ethical.

Correction: just as unethical

Make up is unethical?

This depends on what the makeup is made up of.

To generate realistic looking headshots, you need high quality training data (i.e. high quality headshots) of the person. Then what's stopping them from using stable diffusion and stylize those existing photos in the first place?

At FeatureBase, we did a form with a few prompts building entries for everyone to fill out, which we then sent to Dalle2: https://www.featurebase.com/about

More than a few of us didn't want our images on the Internet, so this was a good compromise.

Made me smile. Team Jacob

This is a great idea. Matt Jaffee wins it for me - coffee sloth!

It’s hilarious to me that the most absurd, standoutish picture is Jason, the only human team member.

Although impressive, many of the photos shown can't be passed off as authentic headshots. Many of the photos linked in the landing page itself have issues. Example [1].

But even if I ignore them most of them, there is something off. Maybe I am biased because I know it's AI-generated, but I also feel they look too polished for the real world. The facial skin isn't generally this perfect. And the bokeh looks like it has been artificially added.

I won't say I can point out 100% of the time when a photo has been AI generated. But if I saw a series of them generated with the same software, I don't think it will be too hard.

[1]: https://bit.ly/4033epk

The hands are a dead giveaway that it is AI as opposed to being simply photoshopped.

Can't unsee now: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FrcQsBIaEAAYMmb.jpg

I'm looking forward to a future in which people have plastic surgery to get "AI hands".

Damn, just as I got those nice jpeg artifacts surgery ...

That hair also seems to want to be part of the jacket.

They all have skin that’s too perfect. The images are high resolution and hyper detail but then the skin looks like it was airbrushed on

I would say >95% of digital portrait photographers retouch and soften their subjects facial features. If they don't do that customers would not be very pleased with the results. So it is a pretty common, accepted and even encouraged practice in portrait photography, particularly in product, wedding and corporate shots.

hands and fingers are frequently off in the landing page shots, although the example you've highlighted is particularly bad. I found a couple where the fingers are correctly formed but the proportions are wrong, e.g. [0]

[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FmSSw-maAAAaZ0g.jpg

Does this dilute the headshot currency in the professional marketplace? If anyone can generate a flawless, idealized photo of themself, surely it reduces the signal headshots once provided: that you have the means to pay a photographer & are willing to invest the time / give a damn about appearing professional.

It might also damage the sense of identity they provide, if the generated images wander too far from reality of the source images.

Most companies strongly discourage you from submitting headshots already. At this point, it's considered unprofessional to submit a picture on an application.

This is highly location specific. In Thailand it's more or less required to include it.

Good point, but headshots are essentially required in arenas other than job hunting. For a startup, it would be unprofessional to pitch investors without headshots of the founding team in the deck. Even in hiring, I'm willing to bet most hiring managers look candidates up on LinkedIn where they will see a headshot.

> At this point, it's considered unprofessional to submit a picture on an application.

Really? This does not match my experience (Europe) Quite the contrary actually.

Where in Europe? Over here in France, it's not that common. I've never had a picture on any of my applications. I don't handle hiring, so I don't get to see many CVs, but the last time I saw some (mid-2022), they didn't have a picture, either.

My experience (also Europe) tends to agree with GP.

:shrug:

ive had a very mixed, in fact I would go so far as to say polarized, experience with it across varius european countries.

Headshots are expected in CVs in the vast majority of the world. To my knowledge the big exceptions are US, UK, Canada, and Australia. But even there it's more like an "exception" since there's generally an unstated expectation that an employer can find more information, including a headshot, of you online.

These are going the way of the dodo. Just a couple years ago you were supposed to include a mini-cv of your parents in your cv, too, and people claimed not having a photo would automatically disqualify.

> vast majority of the world

> minus the largest English speaking economies

There are more people in India than those 4 countries combined. Not sure of your point?

Pretty sure I got rejected from TopTal the other day because I didn't have a decent headshot.

Just uploaded the first photo I could find that fit the size requirements.

Got a rejection email and took a look at other profiles, only to realize they were all using 'professional' looking headshots (which I'm sure reflects better on Toptal)

I have 9 YoE in software and an in-demand skillset, so I think it was the headshot. It's possible they really just have an influx of people now with all the layoffs, but I was signing up because of a recruiting email I had received from them days earlier saying my skills were in demand and they were trying to grow their network

Or you can just take decent pictures? Is this really something we need?

I dunno, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth somehow. Like we’re replacing the things that should be uniquely human with something fake.

Great. You spend 10 minutes trying to take a decent headshot and get back to us with how fun it was.

I’m not saying the product will be the next Facebook, but boy does it solve a very niche and annoying problem.

It took me well over an hour to get a new directory photo of myself that I still hated. Lighting was bad, I looked tired, blemishes etc.

You were tired, you had blemished, light was terrible.. sorry, but that's probably how you look.. And.. THAT'S OKAY! We're humans, that's how humans look.

Sure, but the other guy will hire a professional to set up the details right and have a much better looking photo

And this is why americans all run around with artificially white teeth xD

Everyone is wrong unless they live life like you do, right?

Not like him, but like me!

you assume I think I live right? everyone is wrong, me included.

Aside from having to shoot myself, it isn’t all that bad.

Having it done with the whole team on premises is a lot of fun.

Why should this of all things be uniquely human?

What is the point of headshots if not to give a human connection?

I don’t want to connect with a fake on a dating site, and I don’t want it in a business relationship either.

I live with an actor. Every year or so she gets a set of professional headshots done which costs somewhere between £300 and £1000 depending on the photographer. While the quality of a professional set is undoubtedly better than these (currently) they're not so far off and I can see an acting student or jobbing actor going for a service like this if they're skint.

You still need high quality photos to generate these headshots. Anyone can just put those photos in midjourney or stable diffusion, and with ~10 minutes of prompting, generate their stylized headshots?

You absolutely do not need high quality headshots, that's not how stable diffusion works. I've used similar services before and your run of the mill duck face selfies work fine.

So in the future you'll submit your AI generated headshot that looks nothing like you, but no one actually cares what you look like because they'll replace your face in the final shoot anyway.

Pay for 1k+ international plane rides or coordinate a small army of remote photographers all to have the same style somehow, paying all of them at the same time, perhaps contributing quite a lot to the climate change problem in the process just for some photos.

Or shell out 30 bucks pro-mensch to get a consistent headshot of all employees using whatever Tinder/Grindr/insta photos they have laying around.

I don't own a large company but I know which option I'd pick if I needed to do this.

I really expected to see some "before" shots to understand the value of the solution. For all I know, the input photos were already great...

They're the little images above the big images

They're there, just above them. Super tiny, so it's understandable they were missed.

Time to make the little before images more clear. Cheers!

I'm in the progress of trying it out and they recommend uploading pictures taken with a "professional" camera (and they're very adamant that if you upload bad quality pictures then they won't refund you).

Great idea, and it may really work. The price point looks right for corporate clients, although a lower price point for a small number of photos for private individuals would be nice. Nobody cares if the photo looks a bit retouched. It'll look great on the team webpage or on LinkedIn.

Can I make a suggestion? A similar service is needed for dating purposes. Most people on dating websites have awful photos, the kind you take in front of the bathroom mirror. You'd probably need to offer three pictures: one a headshot, another full-body, and a third in a social setting (party, sports, whatever).

Offering this service, you might even be able to partner up with major dating sites.

Do you think those ones are valid: https://www.metuktakim.co.il/dating.png ?

It's on different(more localized service in Israel) Called: https://www.metuktakim.co.il/

Which is well-dressed in Hebrew :)

The individual himself looks good - a bit of a PUA, but good. One picture with a blurred background is fine (for example, the golfing one) - but all of them is suspicious. And it's important to have at least one picture including other people (although it's acceptable to blur third-party faces in a dating context). Otherwise the guy comes across as a loner; and women are very picky about not dating serial killers.

BTW, that was a comment on the first set of pictures. The selection on the website is much more complete. It's perfect. But it might be worth inserting additional (AI-generated?) individuals on a few of them.

Alright, this has been requested so many times I think it’s time for me to build it.

Looks oddly similar to https://headshotai.studio/, some of their FAQ answers are exactly the same too. Not sure if they are owned by the same person, or if one of them copied the other.

72 hour turn around?!?!?! Seems an awfully long time, these days most studios will have the photos turns around within 30 minutes (at least where I live) I'm surprised to see 3 day turn around time.

Maybe they used a LLM to generate their faq page? Has ChatGPT been known to reiterate content word for word ala github copilot?

Yeah they copied my other product, https://www.profilepicture.ai.

There's no moat around profile pictures, not even good execution.

Gotta keep building, Danny. Go! Go! Go!

Sprinting to get more unique stuff out!

There’s hundreds maybe thousands of profile picture AI startups.

I wonder if those testimonials and the pictures in the copycat's website are AI generated too...

The copy is inconsistent on what you get and how much it costs.

In one place:

> All photoshoots include

> 120 headshots per person

> 3 unique locations per shoot

> 4K photo size

Then the individual shoots have different counts included per tier, some less than indicated for “all photoshoots” on the same page.

Oh that's terrible. As if people didn't already look artificial enough ?

Just looks like some background swaps and retouching. With a 2 hour turnaround are they actually using a human and a copy of Photoshop? Technically AI since that's how Adobe does some of it's tools.

Sorry for the bad PR, but Ive been trying to get a refund for a few days now. On Friday I paid for the service but was not aware it requires over 20 specific photos, which I don't have at hand. I haven't used the compute time. I didn't even upload anything.

I messaged you under a twitter thread, using the livechat on your website and via the email on the invoice. No response.

My email starts with "Tomasz", is similar to my HN handle and is @gmail.com. Please respond.

I can't help it, but reading Dom McLaughlin's testimony (scroll down to the examples) "...let's just say I'm not the most photogenic person..." makes me want to instantly go out and hunt down every picture of me ever made and nuke it from space :-).

I have no problem of photos looking unnatural. Would pay if it made me look like a photo model ;)

Would be great to see examples of the pictures people sent in and the results. The examples on the page are clearly rented pictures of photo models taken by professionally photographers.

Solid feedback, I’ll build a before/after page first thing tomorrow.

Interesting concept. The rendering of the shirt buttons could use some improvement.

Gave it a try. It is pretty wild https://twitter.com/kuizinas/status/1638173950806200324

None of these seem to preserve identity well. I doubt stable diffusion is the right model for this. It should be easy to take a single passport photo and then it into a stylistic headshot. Maybe Pix2Pix or similar?

I would prefer supporting a local photographer.

Sure. But this is a good replacement when your team is in different physical locations.

Ahem, as far as I can tell, the site creates individual headshots, not team photos, so the team members could each just support a local photographer at their own physical location, no?

I thought the benefit of a site like that would be a uniform look for a distributed team. If everyone contacts their local photographer they will all have different tints, formats, sizes and backgrounds.

Support a remote photographer to adjust each local photographer's input into a coherent style.

Having the style and background be the same might be desirable.

Thanks for mentioning this. AI is poised to disrupt the work of many people, including creatives such as photographers, writers, illustrators, etc.

Me too, as its kind of obvious AI has had a part in this. I don't know how, maybe its because I am on the site of topic and its auto-suggestive, but I get that AI vibe.

Not to mention it might be much cheaper. Here in the North of England, I paid half that for a simple headshot on white background from a local photographer. I guess in London it would cost more, but then in London half your friends, and most waiters, are photographers...

You can get a professional headshot for $20? Does it require you to go somewhere? Because if so I'd argue that the cost is the photographer payment plus your time. I think there are very few people looking for a professional headshot who would value their time at less than $20 hour

Now account for a team of 20 people to get them on time, in one place, dressed properly.

A few years ago, we had just that a start-up I was working for. We were told that X day would be picture day, so come dressed in a shirt. A photographer showed up at our office with a bunch of lights in tow. He didn't stay that long. The pictures looked pretty great.

Yeah, I think this service is probably a better value for remote teams, and individuals than it would be for a fully in-office team

I tried that last time, and got upsold a bunch of 'variations', and looking back on everything I bought the next day, none of them looked all that great. The style was too much... well let's say 'country' (which is an accurate reflection of where I am, but I think a professional photographer should be able to adjust to a client's wishes, and I told her specifically what look I did not want - my market is not local), and the studio didn't even have a few colors of shirts I could try on, nor could she advise on the most basic of styling. I mean, they don't even need whole shirts, just get a few collar/shoulder panels for people to throw on ffs.

I'm soured on the whole 'support local' thing (not only because of this episode). Too many chumps.

What I like about this is that it’s not just an A.I gimmick, it solves a real problem. Aka getting professional pics is stressful, time consuming and expensive. I hope it does well

When will people fn learn that smiling is a rare thing. Do not smile, no matter what the idiotic photpographer asks you when creating your corpo headhsot.

Or, you know, let people do what they enjoy doing in photos.

The last thing people do on a photo when they are in the crossfire of multiple lights and someone holding a half a kilo dslr is smiling.

like this 1900s dude https://nextshark.com/19th-century-photo-eating-rice

Is this a joke? Smiling is bad now?

In Russia and in France, smiling at strangers is frowned upon.

Not a joke, but it makes me shudder when people have these borderline idiotic smiles/psycho grin on their faces stickied somewhere on the page while I'm reading their blogs. The worst are the google dev video thumbnails. I mean, those are horrible, like straight from a bad horror movie.

It's like when people show their nonexistent body/beautiful life on Instragram, just fake.

This is something we'll do on our own devices instead of paying anyone a single dime, that was the whole point of stable diffusion

Not to take away from this awesome product and brilliant idea, but we are all hackers here- how can(?) I do this for free?

1. Collect many good quality photos of yourself, in various lighting, directions and settings.

2. Train Stable Diffusion 2.0 to learn this new embedding, this is a bit of an art rather than a science.

3. Find a nice looking prompt with your new embedding that gives you the desired result.

4. Try ControlNet, LoRa, different base models, etc, always questioning your outputs - there's something subtlety off about them...

5. Continue to fine tune your prompt, input, masking and editing

???

N. Realise that it would have been easier to just get a photograper.

This is nice for start. You can find colabs for that todo online here:

https://colab.research.google.com/github/TheLastBen/fast-sta...

Unfortunately, in order to get better result you need to add much more components to perform quality assurance of the photorealism.

Which we perform in here: https://www.metuktakim.co.il

much more robust techniques and in-between steps.

You can try it for free with coupon:777.

We'll appreciate if you happy with the results in your socials, and fill the feedback-form to us to improve.

There seem to be vast numbers of startups being created to make AI avatars and profile pictures.

2 hour turnaround time implies ya'll are doing it manually behind the scenes?

for 120 pictures per person plus upscaling to 4k thats quite a lot of compute time. If they're running it locally its understandable it might take that long

How is this different / better than the other submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35241212

Looks highly inspired by my other product https://www.profilepicture.ai which I launched back in October.

I signed up on profilepicture.ai and paid, but have changed my mind before uploading photos. There is no way to contact you through the site for a refund because the live chat isn't working and there isn't a support email. Also, when I search the help desk no content is returned. How can I reach you?

The more AI surfaces the more I appreciate the real stuff... I must be quite old and boomer, sorry.

Interesting. I also have "AI" fatigue. I said on a different post that the "AI" wave is going to create a counter-culture where people will crave for non "AI" products and services. I think one of the reasons is a combo between empathy, self-reflection, and fear.

Here to say that I hate websites that break the browser's back button.

Glad you made it back to say that though!

ha :)

Tabs

Also: browser bar, type n, press enter, scroll to find original submission

How did it break for you? Seems to work fine on Firefox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com