You can take a usable professional photograph yourself. The equipment argument is settled: a recent phone has far more sensor than something rendered at 400 pixels needs.
What people get wrong is not the camera, and the list of things that matter is shorter than the internet suggests.
The four that decide it
Distance. Arm's length is too close. A wide lens near a face enlarges whatever is nearest, which is the nose, and the effect is subtle enough that people blame their face rather than the geometry. Two metres and 2x zoom is roughly right.
Light. A window, side-on, overcast day. Free and close to ideal. Direct sun is the worst option available. Overhead room lighting puts the eyes in shadow, which is why office photographs look tired.
Wall distance. Stand a metre and a half off it. Closer gives a hard shadow behind the head that is difficult to remove cleanly, and background replacement will struggle with it too.
Volume. Take a hundred. The fortieth beats the fifth because by then people have stopped performing, and you cannot judge which frame works while you are the subject.
The full walkthrough has more patience with the detail, and the routes generally covers when to stop doing it yourself.
The fifty that do not
Sensor size, lens brand, whether you shoot RAW, background blur strength, retouching software, and every accessory sold on the promise of solving any of the above.
They are real variables with small coefficients. The four above dominate, and if any of them is wrong none of the rest recovers it.
Clothing, briefly
Fine stripes and small checks alias when the image is resized, producing a shimmer that reads as a compression fault. Saturated colours pull attention from the face. Logos date the photograph to a job you may leave.
What to wear covers the considerations that get less coverage than they should, particularly necklines and jewellery, which behave differently once the image is small.
Backgrounds
The single highest-leverage choice and the one most often made last. Contrast against your hair rather than a colour you like. The full guide.
If you go the generated route instead
The four variables become one: the source photographs. How to do it properly covers the mechanics, and the rule that dominates is variety across days rather than quantity from one session.
Where this is all going
Worth a caveat rather than a prediction: likeness is converging across the top of the market, and when products stop differing on output they start differing on what they do with your data. Our view, which is a view.
The test
Shrink whatever you produce to 48 pixels. Everything above is either obvious or invisible there.
More on this: The selfies you upload decide more than the tool you pick
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