Show HN: Professional headshots for remote team with AI

https://www.headshotpro.com/

by dannypostma • 3 years ago

138 119 3 years ago

headshotpro.com

nanidin2• 3 years ago

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.

chillbill3• 3 years ago

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

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

Glad you made it back to say that though!

fersarr• 3 years ago

ha :)

chillbill3• 3 years ago

Tabs

skerit• 3 years ago

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

cpach• 3 years ago

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

rahul_nyc• 3 years ago

I would prefer supporting a local photographer.

vages• 3 years ago

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

deepspace• 3 years ago

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?

anon7725• 3 years ago

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

jossclimb• 3 years ago

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.

toyg• 3 years ago

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...

pcthrowaway3• 3 years ago

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

roel_v• 3 years ago

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.

holub0082• 3 years ago

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.

dewey2• 3 years ago

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

wingerlang• 3 years ago

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

holub0082• 3 years ago

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.

hosteur• 3 years ago

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.

somenameforme• 3 years ago

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.

pcthrowaway3• 3 years ago

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

keizo• 3 years ago

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.

t344344• 3 years ago

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

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

darkwater• 3 years ago

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

Correction: are just as ethical.

not-chatgpt2• 3 years ago

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?

chaychoong• 3 years ago

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.

neom• 3 years ago

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.

JCharante2• 3 years ago

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

dannypostma6• 3 years ago

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

echelon• 3 years ago

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

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

andrewstuart2• 3 years ago

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

1xdevloper• 3 years ago

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

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

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.

dsco• 3 years ago

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.

forgotusername62• 3 years ago

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.

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

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.

Kiro• 3 years ago

Why should this of all things be uniquely human?

Aeolun3• 3 years ago

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.

r_hoods_ghost• 3 years ago

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.

not-chatgpt2• 3 years ago

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?

tveita• 3 years ago

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.

junon5• 3 years ago

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.

shubhamjain• 3 years ago

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

forgotusername62• 3 years ago

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

Phelinofist• 3 years ago

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

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

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

Mizoguchi• 3 years ago

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.

KineticLensman• 3 years ago

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

harvey9• 3 years ago

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.

dusted4• 3 years ago

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

ICodeSometimes• 3 years ago

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

RugnirViking2• 3 years ago

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

sai_c• 3 years ago

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 :-).

andrewstuart2• 3 years ago

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

atlantic3• 3 years ago

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.

TheObviousOne2• 3 years ago

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 :)

atlantic3• 3 years ago

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.

dannypostma6• 3 years ago

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

entropyie• 3 years ago

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...

adammarples• 3 years ago

They're the little images above the big images

junon5• 3 years ago

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

dannypostma6• 3 years ago

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

JCharante2• 3 years ago

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).

lofaszvanitt3• 3 years ago

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.

junon5• 3 years ago

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

lofaszvanitt3• 3 years ago

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.

swyx• 3 years ago

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

halfmatthalfcat• 3 years ago

Is this a joke? Smiling is bad now?

nanidin2• 3 years ago

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

lofaszvanitt3• 3 years ago

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.

okokwhatever• 3 years ago

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

elforce002• 3 years ago

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.

kordlessagain• 3 years ago

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.

M4tze• 3 years ago

Made me smile. Team Jacob

newfie_bullet• 3 years ago

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

ashtonmeuser• 3 years ago

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

z3t4• 3 years ago

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.

dannypostma6• 3 years ago

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

hammock• 3 years ago

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

operator-name• 3 years ago

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.

TheObviousOne2• 3 years ago

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.

Varqu• 3 years ago

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

dannypostma6• 3 years ago

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

replwoacause• 3 years ago

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?

dagorenouf• 3 years ago

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

gajus• 3 years ago

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

villgax• 3 years ago

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

tomwojcik• 3 years ago

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.

akrymski• 3 years ago

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?

Show HN: Professional headshots for remote team with AI

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