Professional headshots are in demand today more than ever in the past. When you wish to travel or work abroad, institutions like your immigration department will ask for your headshot, starting from when you apply for a port. When applying for your dream job, your resume should include your headshot.
However, not every time will you have the financial resources to get a professional-looking headshot. Yes, it is pricey. Nowadays, a basic headshot session costs $150 to $300, with the mid-range sessions costing up to $600, and the high-end headshot sessions even above those ranges. That expensive? Sure, you may find headshot photoshoots around the price of buying your coffee at McDonald’s or perhaps even less. Still, it’s heavily edited – the photographer will edit you with a formalwear template – and they generally don’t look good.
This is why technology comes into the scene, providing professional-looking headshots without you spending as much as $150. Tools like portraitpal.ai are here to help you out. What are the benefits of these platforms, and what are the amazing technologies behind them? Find out in this guide.
Benefits Of Using AI Headshot Generators
AI headshot generators work as simple as your ChatGPT. Some of those tools let you enter a prompt plus your image you want to be turned into a professional headshot, and voila! Here are the benefits:
Make Your Career Even More Professional
One of the best benefits of using AI headshot generators is that their output is best suited for
sites like LinkedIn and Microsoft Teams. First impressions last, generally speaking, so when trying to network with your colleagues or when job hunting, putting your best foot forward through headshots is always the best practice.
Spice Up Your Social Life
Nowadays, presenting yourself well is beyond just your workplace. AI headshot generators can be leveraged for various other uses outside your professional endeavors. You can use these headshots as your virtual profile pictures on Facebook or LinkedIn, should you be keen on using those platforms for work, too. People are more likely to respond to you or treat you better when you look professional online.
Convenience And Affordability
The third and perhaps the most trivial, yet also the most important, are convenience and affordability. Nothing beats obtaining a professional-looking headshot without traveling to a shopping mall, asking around where the studio is, and waiting in a queue. It’s like playing a casino at home. Plus, you will never need to pay so much to a photographer to get beautiful shots. After all, you cannot always be sure whether the photographer is really talented, can you?
Amazing Technologies Behind AI Headshot Generators
Stable Diffusion
Stable diffusion is usually the baseline model, the foundation of AI headshot generators. It is constantly trained and fine-tuned to generate the most realistic headshots. Stable diffusion falls under deep learning models that work by iteratively refining a noisy picture to produce a high-quality image. So, even if that’s a random selfie you did at the beach, this technology can turn this image into a stunning, professional-looking headshot.
In other words, stable diffusion is a prompt-to-image model that generates images from those prompts by gradually removing random noise. The prompt is evaluated to create an image representation, with the last step being upscaling the image to a high-resolution quality. A latent space facilitates this, compressing the data and capturing its underlying structure, reducing processing requirements.
Fine-Tuning And Control
Fine-tuning and control are another set of technologies for generating headshots using AI. However, they are part of the whole process. Fine-tuning involves grabbing a pre-trained model and training it further on tinier, more specific datasets specially crafted for a particular task, such as converting an amateur image into a professional-looking one.
These technologies are crucial for generating realistic and professional headshots. As discussed, the parameters of a pre-trained AI model are adjusted to match a task, generating high-quality headshots. Meanwhile, the control part pertains to the techniques used to guide the AI to create detailed features, such as facial expressions – is the image smiling or just slightly smiling? – lighting, background settings, and the like.
Variational Autoencoders
Variational autoencoders, or VAEs, are technologies that accompany the process. They are in-charge of assisting with generating high-quality shots by learning a compressed representation of the data prior to decoding them back to the image. What again? Read on.
Well, to put it simply, VAEs’ main tasks are also to create high-quality, realistic, and professional-looking images. The input data that VAEs learn and work with, together with their compressed representation, are the source headshot images in this particular task. However, the data are in a lower-dimensional latent space whose representation is decoded back into the reconstructed image. Through this process, the technology generates new photos that resemble the source images through sampling from the latent space.
Conclusion + Controversies
Most of you may be surprised to learn that there are now technologies capable of generating professional headshots as if you’ve done it in a professional studio with professional photographers, not those small-scale studios or rush photo studios inside malls, for instance.
But wait. Before you jump into trying them, it is important that you are familiar with how the technologies behind them work. Know that these technologies don’t work in a flat space. There is expertise involved that maybe only computer specialists can enlighten you with when you wish to find out more about them.
Moreover, you should also know the boundaries and limitations when using such technologies.
For instance, when you need headshots for working abroad, many institutions that process your application are not yet open to headshots created using AI. However, you can more readily use them when presenting yourself well at work with your virtual profile pictures and whatnot. Why don’t you generate your AI headshot today?
