DIY Professional Headshot – How to Make a Professional Headshot on Your Own
Last Updated on September 22, 2025 by Peter Wood
A professional headshot is an important first impression of your online presence. How to make a professional headshot on your own? The headshot should accurately reflect the image you’re trying to portray.
What should you prepare before taking a shoot for a headshot profile? How to pose like a professional? How to edit and enhance headshot profile? Just learn more details from the ultimate guide from the article.
Part 1: What Should You Prepare to Make a Professional Headshot
1. Look for Simple Background
Just find a plain wall as a headshot background in your house without window blinds, kitchen cabinets, couches, etc. Anyway, remove everything from the background that might attract attention.
2. Optimize the Lighting Inside
The soft, diffused light from the window is extremely flattering and will make the picture look professionally taken. Of course, you can use a lamp or even ring light to optimize the lighting inside.
3: Set up a Tripod for Smartphone
Whether you use a smartphone or digital camera to make professional profile headshots, a tripod is necessary to stabilize the device. It can remove shaking and blurry from your headshots.
4: Use Timer to Make Headshot
The timer is not a new feature. And most smartphones and digital cameras have built-in this feature. It gives you a few seconds to get in place when taking professional headshots.
5: Choose a Professional Camera
The camera is important when making professional headshots. Of course, you can use a high-resolution smartphone if the digital camera is not available. You have to set up the device beforehand.
6: Take Headshots in High Resolution
To make a professional headshot, you should get the profile in high quality, so that you can edit it later. Both digital cameras and smartphones let you adjust the photo quality before shooting.
7: Choose a Proper Image Format
Both digital cameras and smartphones allow you to decide the photo format when making a professional headshot. With a digital camera, for instance, you’d better choose RAW, HEIC, or PNG instead.
8: Retouch Headshots as Desired
The last but not least step to make a professional headshot is to retouch your headshot photos. A powerful headshot avatar editor can help you to enhance and make your photos perfect easily.
Part 2: How to Pose Like a Professional for Headshot Profiles
9: Make up for Professional Headshot
Even if you can edit your headshot profiles later with avatar editors, make-up is still an essential step to make everything professional. It can give you a good appearance and complexion.
10: Dress for Success
The professional headshots can be used for different purposes. It determines your dress. In the resume, for example, you should get fully dressed. You can also have your formal attire for your LinkedIn profile.
11: Pose Like a Professional
You should practice posing in front of a mirror before taking a headshot photo. Rehearse a few poses and expressions that exude confidence, warmth, and approachability to choose the optimal one.
12: Angle Your Posture
When you have a favorite angle, which makes you look more photogenic in the professional headshots. You can also try many postures to choose the desired one according to your requirement.
13: Take Multiple Headshots
It is difficult to make a professional headshot at the first time for beginners, but you can take practice and shoots a lot of digital photos at one time. Just select the suitable ones for different platforms.
14: Select Headshots with Friends
After you make several professional headshots, you should pick the best one up with your friends. Alternatively, create an online test and let others decide the result is another option.
Part 3: How to Edit the Professional Headshot Profile on Your Own
When you need to make professional headshots, or apply virtual makeup for portraits, WidsMob Portrait Pro is a versatile AI avatar editor to apply all-rounded makeup filters. It enables you to manage skin area, enhance a portrait, or apply virtual makeup. Moreover, you can also customize a series of portrait filters as a preset. There are different photo sizes, templates, and more other settings to personalize the headshots.
- Customize a series of makeup filters to headshot profiles within one click.
- Adjust the skin area, change the skin tone, brighten and smoothing skin.
- Touch up nose, skin, eyes, blemish, teeth, and other facial points easily.
- Export the headshots with the desired quality, size, and more other settings.
How to Make Professional Headshots by Retouching
Step 1: Run the headshot editor after installation. You can click the Select Photos button or the Select Folder button to import your headshots into the program. Once you have imported the headshot into the program, it will detect all facial points automatically.
Step 2: If you have already saved a preset, you can simply apply a preset from the Preset tab to apply a series of filters, such as Smoothing + Multiple Effects. Of course, you can also choose the Edit tab to make a professional headshot according to your requirement.
Step 3: It enables you to manage the headshot skin, such as adjust the skin area for touch up, smooth the skin, change skin tone, brighten skin, and more others. Moreover, you can also choose the Enhancements option to lift cheek, slim face, enlarge eyes, remove shine, etc.
Step 4: When you need to make a professional headshot, you can also choose the different filters of makeup with advanced templates. It provides multiple presets, colors, and positions. Just choose a template with the desired color and position to make up a headshot profile.
Step 5: Once you have made a professional headshot, you can click the Export button to customize the size, photo format, and quality. It enables to have a new name instead of replacing the original one. After that, you can upload the headshot to social media accounts.
Part 4: FAQs about Making Professional Headshot Profile
You can go to a professional headshot studio and ask help from a professional photographer, such as JCPenney Portraits. But the price is usually very high and you cannot get all photos.
A professional headshot profile can be used for different purposes. A resume, for example, needs your recent headshot. Moreover, headshots can be used as profile pictures on social media and other platforms.
No. A selfie should not be the same as a headshot, especially when you need a professional headshot. You have to use a timer or ask someone to help you take the photos.
Conclusion
You should understand how to make professional headshots on your own at home. Once you have taken a satisfactory headshot, you can take advantage of the avatar editor to edit the photos with WidsMob Portrait Pro. It is an all-in-one headshot editor to manage the skin, enhance a portrait, and have virtual makeup within clicks. Just free download the program to make a professional headshot now.