What makes a good reference photo
The likeness is decided before any modelling starts. A good phone snapshot beats a bad professional portrait, and a few things genuinely cannot be recovered afterwards.
People apologise for their photos far more than they need to. Almost nobody has studio portraits of the person they want made into a figure, and that is fine — the pictures that work are ordinary ones. What matters is narrower than most people expect.
The short version
- Daylight, indirect. Near a window, not in the sun.
- Face sharp and unobstructed, filling a good part of the frame.
- Taken from roughly chest height, camera level with the face.
- Two or three photos: front, three-quarter, and one full-body for proportions.
- One extra photo of the clothing you want, even if it is a different day.
If you have that, stop reading and send them.
Light
Soft, even daylight is the whole game. Standing a couple of metres inside a window on an overcast day gives almost perfect light: it wraps around the face and shows the shape of the nose, the cheekbones, the chin.
What does not work:
- Direct sun. Hard shadows carve features that are not there and hide ones that are. Squinting also changes the whole face.
- Backlight. A window or a bright sky behind the person turns the face into a dark shape. This is the most common unusable photo.
- Direct flash. It flattens everything. A face lit head-on has no visible structure — and structure is precisely what has to be sculpted.
- Ceiling light only. Shadows under the brow and chin, nothing in between.
Distance and lens
Phone cameras exaggerate whatever is closest. A selfie at arm's length enlarges the nose and shrinks the ears — that is optics, not vanity, and it is why people dislike their own selfies.
Have someone else take the picture from about two metres away and zoom in slightly, or use the longer lens if the phone has one. The face should still fill a decent part of the frame; a person standing five metres away in a group shot leaves too few pixels to work with, no matter how good the camera is.
Angle
Camera at the same height as the face. Photographed from above, the forehead grows and the jaw disappears; from below, the opposite. Both distortions are hard to undo, because there is no way to know how much of what you see is the person and how much is the angle.
Ideally send two: one straight on, one three-quarter — head turned about 45 degrees. The front view gives symmetry and proportion, the three-quarter gives the profile of the nose and the depth of the face. Together they resolve almost everything.
A sharp, dull, badly composed photo in flat daylight is worth more than a beautiful one with the face in shadow.
Expression
Choose the expression you actually want to keep, because it will be the permanent one. A broad open-mouthed laugh is difficult at figure scale and often reads oddly in resin; a closed or slight smile survives the translation much better.
More importantly: pick a photo that looks like the person to you. Families usually know instantly which picture "is" someone. That instinct is more reliable than any technical criterion here.
Hair, glasses, hats
Hair needs to be visible in outline — a photo against a busy background of the same colour as the hair makes the silhouette a guess. If the hair is usually tied up or usually down, send it the way it should be on the figure.
Glasses are fine and can be sculpted, but send at least one photo without them if possible, or a second angle: heavy reflections hide the shape of the eyes underneath.
Hats and helmets are welcome — they just have to be in the photos, because they change the whole head shape.
Clothing and the full-body shot
A head photo alone leaves the body to be invented. One full-length picture, taken from the front at a normal distance, settles proportions: height, build, posture, the length of the coat.
It does not have to be from the same day or the same outfit. If you want the figure in a particular jacket, a uniform, a wedding dress or a football shirt, send a photo of the garment — worn by anyone, or laid out flat. Details like a badge, an embroidery, a particular collar need their own close-up.
What can be fixed, and what cannot
| Can be handled | Cannot be recovered |
|---|---|
| Busy background, other people in the frame | Face in shadow or blown out white |
| Slightly warm or cool colour cast | Motion blur or an out-of-focus face |
| A different outfit from a second photo | Face too small in the frame — no detail exists |
| Changing a pose or a hairstyle | Sunglasses in every single photo |
| Old photos, film scans, slightly grainy | Only one photo, taken from above, at arm's length |
Old and irreplaceable photos
Memorial pieces often come with one photograph and no possibility of another. Send it anyway. A grainy, faded, small print can still carry enough — send the best scan or the sharpest phone photo of the print you can manage, flat and evenly lit, without flash. Where information is genuinely missing, we ask rather than guess, and you see it in the preview before anything is printed.
Sending them
Attach the originals, not screenshots and not images pasted into a chat — messengers compress hard, and the compression removes exactly the fine detail that matters. Straight from the phone's gallery is best.
You can attach photos directly to the order form, and nothing is printed until you have seen and approved the 3D preview. Photos are used only to make your figure and are deleted 90 days after delivery.
Read next: How a photo becomes a 3D figure, or start a custom order.
