Headshot Proofs: How to Send Them So Clients Pick in One Reply

Headshot proofing has a problem other genres do not: the frames are nearly identical. Same person, same light, same background, and the differences between frames are a fraction of a smile and a few degrees of head tilt. The way you present the proofs has to make those tiny differences easy to see — or the client will ask for all of them, or none.

Show fewer, larger frames

Cull hard before the client sees anything. Remove the blinks, the half-smiles, and the near-duplicates, and show a person somewhere around 12 to 20 frames. People choose more confidently from fifteen good options than from sixty that differ by a hair — and you spend less time answering 'what's the difference between 23 and 24?'

Then make the frames large. Four across and four down on a portrait page gives each headshot enough size to judge the eyes, which is what every headshot decision really comes down to.

Same size, same crop, same order

• Fill each cell so every frame is cropped to the same shape. If one frame is slightly wider, it looks different for reasons that have nothing to do with the expression.
• Keep capture order. Expressions develop over a run of frames, and the client sees the person relaxing into the session.
• Leave the colour alone between frames. Edit the set consistently, or the client chooses the warmest frame rather than the best one.

Team days: one sheet per person

A corporate session can mean forty people in an afternoon, and the person collecting the choices is usually an office manager rather than the people photographed. Make their job easy:

1. 01Rename the files by person as you go — jsmith-01.jpg, jsmith-02.jpg. The batch file renamer does a whole set in one pass.
2. 02Make one sheet per person, with their name in the header.
3. 03Send each person their own sheet and ask them to choose one or two.
4. 04Collect the answers as filenames. A filename that includes the person's name is impossible to mix up.

Review links work even better here: one link per person with a pick limit of one, and you get an email as each person chooses — no chasing a spreadsheet around the office.

Actor headshots: proof by look

Actors usually need options for different casting types, and their agent will want a say. Group the proofs by look — the suit, the jumper, the plain T-shirt — and put the look in the filename: look-2-grey-jumper-14.jpg. The actor can then ask for one from each look, and the agent can reply with filenames instead of descriptions.

Retouch only the picks

Say clearly that proofs are colour-corrected but not retouched, and that retouching is done on the chosen frames. Otherwise a client will choose against a blemish that would have taken thirty seconds to remove — and reject the frame with the best expression in the set.

The email