LuxShot only knows you as well as the references you give it. A great face reference is the difference between portraits that feel like you and portraits that feel like a stranger wearing your face. The good news: it takes three minutes, no special gear, and the rules are short.
Light is everything
Stand near a window during the day. Face the window directly — the light should land on your face, not behind you. If you can see your own shadow on the wall behind you, the window is in the right place.
Avoid overhead light (kitchens, bathrooms — anywhere with a single ceiling fixture). It carves your face into ridges and the model learns those ridges as your bone structure. Diffused daylight gives a softer, more accurate read.
Frame and composition
The reference should be a tight head-and-shoulders crop. Your face should fill roughly 60–70% of the frame vertically. Eyes a third of the way down from the top. No hats, no sunglasses, no high collars covering your jaw.
Look straight at the lens. Slight tilts read as character — heavy tilts read as a different face shape. Keep your expression neutral and your mouth closed. Smiles are fine but teeth-bearing grins distort the lower face and the model will reproduce that distortion in every shoot.
What kills a reference
- Filters of any kind — Snapchat, Instagram, beauty modes on your phone camera
- Heavy makeup that hides your actual features
- Motion blur — hold the phone steady, brace your elbows against your ribs
- Low resolution — screenshots of other photos lose detail every step
- Group photos — even cropped down, the model picks up other faces in the periphery
Multiple angles help
Upload three to five references. Slight head-turns, slight expression changes — same lighting, same crop discipline. The model averages across them. One slightly-off reference in a set of five is fine. One reference, slightly off, becomes the entire signal.
Test it
Run a single shoot before you upload a full set. If the result doesn't look like you, the references are the first thing to fix. Lighting and crop matter more than camera quality — a three-year-old iPhone in good window light beats a brand-new phone under kitchen halogens, every time.