A professional headshot,
two seconds from now

Yes — no card, no account, no trial timer and no watermark. The quality check, all eight style packs, unlimited generations and full-size downloads cost nothing and always have. Studio, a paid tier that trains a private model on your face, is in beta; the free studio is not a preview of it, it is the product.

One. Most paid tools want between 6 and 20 selfies because they fine-tune a private model on your face and need the training data. Poised generates from a single reference photo plus the details you confirm, so one clear, well-lit, front-facing shot is enough — and you can generate with no photo at all by describing yourself instead.

It produces a professional portrait of someone with your features, colouring, styling and framing — the photo you would have got from a decent studio session, rather than a retouched copy of the selfie you uploaded. Nothing is trained on your face, so it is a strong likeness rather than a forensic one. That is exactly why the skin tone, age, hair and expression controls are there: set them and regenerate until it reads as you. Studio, our paid tier in beta, trains a private model on 6 to 10 photos for a materially closer match.

Nothing happens to it, because it is never uploaded. The file is decoded and measured inside your own browser tab — the quality scores are computed on your device and the photo is never sent to us, never written to a database and never used to train anything. Your generated results live in your browser too.

Yes. You keep full rights to anything you generate — LinkedIn, company sites, press kits, decks, business cards. That applies on the free tier, with no separate licence to buy.

Speed, price and effort. Those tools fine-tune a model on your face, which means 6 to 20 uploads, a 15-minute to two-hour wait and $29 to $79 spent before you see a single result. Poised hands you a finished headshot about two seconds after you arrive, from one photo, for nothing — so you find out whether an AI headshot suits you at all before anyone asks for a card. What their fee buys is a trained likeness and, on some tiers, print resolution; that is what our own Studio tier is being built for. There are full tool-by-tool breakdowns on our comparison pages.

819 × 1024 pixels — more than LinkedIn, Slack, conference bios, press pages and company directories actually display, with enough headroom to crop in and stay sharp. That is what the free tier delivers, with no watermark and nothing to unlock. Print-size output at 2048 × 2560 is part of the Studio tier, which is in beta.

This is the thing we test hardest. Image models have a well-documented tendency to drift towards lighter skin and younger faces, so Poised names skin tone, age and hair explicitly in every prompt rather than leaving it to the model, and asks you to confirm the tone it estimated from your photo. Our spot checks across deep and rich-deep tones, ages from the twenties to the sixties, grey hair, locs, braids and a hijab all come back correct. If a result still does not match you, set the controls by hand and regenerate. The quality check has never had this problem: it measures exposure on your face rather than the whole frame, so a deliberately low-key portrait or a deeper skin tone is not scored as a fault.

Attitudes have shifted quickly as the tools have gone mainstream, but the safest rule is unchanged: a headshot should look like the person who turns up to the interview. Use a result that matches how you actually look, and avoid ones that have smoothed or restructured your features.