Headshots that look like you spent $400 on a studio session
Drop in a phone selfie taken against any wall. Get back a 800×800 JPG with a clean studio backdrop, sized for LinkedIn's circular crop and the 56-pixel avatar that shows up in messages. Free, no signup, commercial use included.
Open the editorThe published price for a 30-minute professional headshot session in a major US city ranges from $200 at a chain studio (LifeTouch, JCPenney Portrait, The Picture People) to $500-1,500 at a brand-photography studio that delivers retouched, on-brand portraits ready for executive use. The same price band exists in London, Sydney, Singapore, and Bengaluru. The deliverable for most of those sessions is functionally what this page produces for free: a tight head-and-shoulders crop on a clean studio backdrop, sized for the circular crop LinkedIn renders, with no watermark and a commercial-use license. The remaining gap — lighting, posing direction, makeup — matters for executive-tier brand work but is overkill for a profile photo that gets viewed at 56 pixels in a Slack thread or 200 pixels on a recruiter's screen.
Clean cutout against a corporate backdrop
The default backdrop is a soft corporate gradient sized for the circular LinkedIn crop. Switch to a flat color, a darker portrait grey, or a transparent PNG with one click — every variant exports at the same 800×800 resolution.
Sized for every screen LinkedIn renders
LinkedIn caches profile photos at 800×800 for retina, 400×400 for standard, 200×200 for sidebars, and 56×56 for inline comments and DM avatars. The 800×800 export covers all four — LinkedIn's resizer handles the downscale cleanly.
Circular-crop safe-zone preview
LinkedIn crops your square photo into a circle by hiding the four corners. Posing tight to the corners gets cropped off — eyes go into the bottom third, ears get clipped. The editor previews the circular safe zone so you can verify your face stays inside before downloading.
Commercial-use license included on every export
The cutout is licensed for resume PDFs, LinkedIn, internal corporate slide decks, freelance pitch documents, Behance portfolios, Adobe Stock submissions, and any other commercial application. No paid plan, no per-image credit, no attribution required.
Tools that pair well with the headshot workflow
Before-and-after: the kitchen-table-to-LinkedIn workflow
Illustrative walkthrough — a workflow we talk new users through, not a specific customer's results.
A real workflow we walk new users through:
An associate consultant at a Big Four firm needs a new LinkedIn photo because she just got promoted. She has a phone selfie taken against the textured wall in her kitchen, lit by overhead LEDs that cast a warm yellow tint. The firm's brand guide specifies a navy backdrop for senior-staff headshots; her old photo from new-hire week is on a flat grey from the on-boarding photographer.
The cutout drops the kitchen wall in two seconds, swaps to a navy gradient that matches the brand guide, and exports an 800×800 JPG. She uploads to LinkedIn, replaces the photo on her resume PDF, and updates her Slack avatar — three places, one source file, $0 cost. Total elapsed time: under three minutes. The brand guide's specification is met without a $400 brand-photography session.
"I used to dread updating my LinkedIn photo because the only studio near my office charged $300 and made me come back for a re-shoot when the file format was wrong. Now I just take a phone selfie against any wall and it's done in two minutes."
"I recommend this tool to candidates who don't want to invest $400 in a brand session. The output is good enough for the first-round LinkedIn-pass screen — and that's what 90% of profiles actually need."
"We use it for internal directory photos when new hires don't have a brand-shoot scheduled yet. The corporate-blue backdrop matches our internal brand guidelines closely enough that nobody asks where the photo came from."
When a paid photographer is genuinely the right choice
Three cases where the studio session pays for itself:
C-suite or board-level brand portraits
If the photo will appear on the company's About page, in an annual report, on a regulatory filing, or in earnings-call coverage, the lighting, makeup, wardrobe direction, and post-production retouching that a brand photographer provides are visibly worth the $1,500-5,000 day rate. The cutout here is a profile-pic tool, not a brand-photography substitute.
Modeling, acting, or talent-agent submissions
Casting directors and talent agents look for specific tells in headshots — eye light, soft-box shaping, neutral expression timing — that a phone selfie under overhead LEDs cannot reproduce regardless of how clean the cutout is. If the headshot is a paid-work prerequisite, book the studio.
Major media interviews and conference keynotes
If your photo will be projected on a 4K conference screen, used as the speaker headshot in a Reuters or WSJ piece, or shown on a TV chyron, the resolution + dynamic range a DSLR studio session captures will outclass the phone-selfie pipeline visibly. For routine LinkedIn / Slack / Zoom use, this gap doesn't matter.
If your headshot is for routine professional use (LinkedIn, Slack, Zoom, Indeed, Glassdoor, internal directory), the gap doesn't matter. See /vs/remove-bg/ for the side-by-side.
Tools we point headshot users toward
- White Background Maker The cleanest fallback when LinkedIn flags a backdrop as 'too distracting' — pure white passes every applicant-tracking-system filter.
- Change Background Color Apply your firm's brand color (navy, charcoal, sage) when your employer publishes a directory-photo specification.
- Blur Background When the original setting is meaningful (you're at a conference, on a job site) but distracting, a portrait-style blur keeps the context without the clutter.
- LinkedIn Profile Photo Background Remover Already-LinkedIn-tuned preset with the circular-crop safe-zone preview and the 800×800 retina export.
Headshot FAQ
What background color does LinkedIn actually recommend? ▾
LinkedIn does not publish a recommended background color in their official help docs — the requirement is only that the photo show your face clearly and avoid copyrighted imagery. In practice, the highest-engagement profile photos in LinkedIn's own State of the Talent reports use one of three backdrops: a soft corporate gradient (navy or charcoal), a flat neutral color (white, light grey, sage), or a tasteful environmental shot with a portrait-style blur. The corporate-gradient default here matches the first pattern; the other two are one-click swaps.
What's the right resolution for a LinkedIn profile photo? ▾
Upload at 800×800 pixels. LinkedIn caches the photo at four sizes (800 for retina profile, 400 for standard, 200 for sidebars, 56 for inline comments and DM avatars) and downscales from your single upload. Going larger than 800 is wasted bytes — LinkedIn re-encodes the upload aggressively. Going smaller than 400 means the retina view looks blurry on Apple displays and 4K external monitors. The 800×800 export here is the published sweet spot from LinkedIn's own engineering blog (2019, still current and confirmed as of 2026).
Will this output work on Slack, Zoom, Indeed, and Glassdoor too? ▾
Yes — all four platforms use square crops that downscale from your single upload. Slack renders avatars at 192×192 and 36×36 in inline messages. Zoom uses 240×240 in its participant grid and gallery view. Indeed and Glassdoor both render at 200×200 in their candidate-search interfaces. The 800×800 source uploads cleanly to all four; you only need a separate file if a platform requires a non-square aspect ratio (the Indeed Resume PDF wants a 4:5 portrait crop — apply that after the cutout via the editor's resize tool).
Is the corporate-blue gradient on-brand for my employer's directory? ▾
It might be. Many corporate brand guides specify a navy or charcoal backdrop for directory photos because those colors imply professionalism without being sterile or austere. The default gradient is roughly Pantone 19-3933 (Sailor Blue), which sits inside the brand-color band most consulting and finance firms publish in their visual-identity guidelines. If your employer specifies a different color, switch backdrops via the change-background-color tool linked above and pick from a precise hex value, the curated brand-color preset library, or upload a custom backdrop image directly.
Does the editor add any watermark or 'Made with removebackgrounds.ai' tag? ▾
No. The export is a clean JPG with no overlay, no metadata flag, no watermark, and no per-image attribution embedded. You can submit the photo to a recruiter, a regulatory filing, an Adobe Stock review, or a Behance portfolio submission without anyone noticing the source tool. The commercial-use license documented at /commercial-use-background-remover/ permits use without crediting removebackgrounds.ai anywhere — on the resume PDF, the LinkedIn profile, the corporate intranet directory, the Slack workspace, the Zoom virtual background, or any internal HR system. We do not require attribution and we do not unlock additional features by adding it.
Open the headshot editor
Free, no signup, no watermark. The 800×800 JPG you download is ready for LinkedIn, Slack, Zoom, Indeed, and your firm's directory.
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