Sunday Scaries: Can you get a good professional headshot using Ai?

In the past few weeks I had 3 people request headshots from me for events I was speaking at and I've always struggled to provide anything good because I don't have many good photos of myself.

Then a friend said they'd used https://www.tryitonai.com/ for their headshots and then I got an ad for Retrato and ProPhotosAi so I thought I'll give these a try and see if there's any I can use.

I'll separate the results from each so you can get a good idea of what each one does. Firstly, here are some of the headshots I do have of myself to set a benchmark for what the AI produced:

ProPhotoAi

ProPhoto's gave me the choice between $25 and 40 photos in formal business wear, $55 for 80 photos in a range of clothing styles up to $155 for 160 photos, 12 background styles and 8 styles of clothing. The higher the price point, the quicker the photos but even at 90 minutes at the slowest rate, much quicker than the others.

As someone that doesn’t wear suits or even own one at the moment, I was picturing my professional photos to come out like this:

I was surprised though, there was a good mix of ultra professional in a suit and office environment like this:

Compared to the other tools I reviewed, the number of suitable variants to poses, angles and lighting was much better with ProPhoto. Some did come back a little over polished or illustrated but I’ve seen worse photoshopping…

There weren’t any of the totally unhinged or bizarre results like I saw with Retrato, almost every photo was usable or somewhat accurate.

Out of the 3, ProPhoto’s excelled especially in one key area: hands & fingers.

This is by far the most realistic hand of all 3 tools, a known weakness for most AI imagery for reasons I don’t understand. The right number of fingers, not blended into my skull or coffee cup, just normal.

Some of the double fisting coffees with pig trotters you see from Retrato, doesn’t really happen with ProPhoto’s.

Another feature they have which I'm going to explore further is the ability to create consistent looks across multiple people, a potential solution for businesses looking for company headshots.

Retrato

Retrato was $5 for 80 photos, I think it took about 8 hours for the results to come through and fair to say the results were mixed. Let's start with the ones that have somewhat of a likeness to me - with the caveat that the likeness is if I'd lost weight, was wearing makeup, had studio quality lighting and maybe some retouching:

Not bad, I think? I feel like if I used one of these as a LinkedIn profile photo, most people wouldn't think it was AI. They'd probably wonder why I didn't smile more but hey, what's new.

Now we get to the more fun side of Retrato, the unhinged results:

Overall, I think for $5 you would get at least 4-5 potentially usable photos and a good laugh from the randomness it also produces.

Tryitonai

Try it on is $17 USD and takes about 24 hours to deliver the results but it was pretty quick to see what the difference in price gets you:

My biggest reluctance to use any of the photo's try it on produced is I feel like I'd be catfishing people. The photo's are much realistic overall and there's no really unhinged photo's like Retrato produced.

Here's a photo each site produced that looked the least like me side by side:

I think try it on AI is worth the money vs what an actual photo shoot would cost and there are options for choosing more business themed results.