The Secret to Perfect Headshot Composition

I have a gallery show opening today and and it's all close-ups of people's faces I have spent so much time prepping this Gallery composing and getting the shots balanced and making the image feel correct to me so one of the things that I really try to go for when I'm cropping and composing a final image is finding balance like making sure the image doesn't feel like it's too off to the right or too off to the left and so it made me think that this might be something that was useful to you there are two ways that I do this uh one is I use the pupils of the eye and the second is I use the Ridgeline of the nose either the side of the nose or the center of the nose I'm very precise about it and so I'm going to show you now with some images that I did with a session with my friend Alex let's take a look at that now okay so taking a look at this first image I have a panel here set up with just the grid and the crop tool these are the tools that I need primarily I want to make sure that my grid currently is set to 3 on the long Edge and three on the short Edge if I show the grid you'll see that there are three sections on the long Edge and three sections on the short Edge this means sections this does not mean lines it's a little confusing I get it so if you were to say two then it's going to mean two sections on the long Edge not two lines so that's something to keep in mind if you go to one there is no section you'll also notice here under grid type we have rectangular we have golden ratio and we have the Fibonacci spiral I'm going to stick with rectangle so that we're working in a simple rectangular grid and I'm going to use a three by three grid if I turn off show it's not going to show the grid if we look at the crop tool here it says show grid while cropping so I am not currently cropping even though I am on the crop tool if I were to go in and start cropping then the gray grid will show up those are the basic grid settings that you need to be aware of under the crop here you have the ratio and you can add custom ratios I have a few different custom ratios set up for the purpose of this I'm going to stick to 4x5 and 16x9 and I'll get into that in a bit so starting with this image the primary thing that I will do is I want to try and balance on the eye pupils or the nose Ridge line if I come in and I start cropping like this I want to put a horizontal line on one pupil and the vertical line on the other pupil when I open this up and remove the grid you can see this is a nice balanced composition if I want to change the ratio of the crop which I can do here or I can do up in the crop tool at the top let's say I take this back to a two by three then as I'm moving this I want to re-position the grid to get the photo balanced for the ratio of the crop so having the composition be a lot more balanced if I want to take this to a vertical image and I'm going to set that as a four by five go vertical if I if I take this off this feels it's a little a little off I'm going to align one of the lines up here with the pupil that's a more balanced image if I crop in tighter to get right in on these pupils I'm going to have a vertical line on one a horizontal line on the other now with this being a tight crop you can see it's it's definitely tight but it's off to the side so this is when I would switch to putting a line on the ridge line of the nose so now I'm going to change this short to two so that I have a center line and now I'm going to use the ridge line of the nose and a pupil to balance the image if I put it down the center of the nose here you can see it's still off to the side but if I bring it over to the ridge line of the nose the image is better but it's still not great so what I want to do now is I'm going to say okay well this isn't the pupil that's going to give me balance so I'm going to pull the crop out until I have the grid line going through this pupil and then I can bring this back to the ridge line of the nose that's a much more balanced image so if I pull this crop out all the way it's too off if I move this grid line to the pupil now that composition is perfect so as you adjust your crop you want to adjust your grid lines now because we have this triangle down here in the lower right and this head and more of the upper left the image has a much greater balance to it as we move through the image our eyes take us from the face down through the hands and then bring us back up to the face if you find this video useful so far hit that like button and let YouTube know that this is a video that you like it really helps me out and I really appreciate it it's a very simple small little gesture that you can do to help out this channel so now I want to take a look at this photo this the composition on this is and the mood and the tone of this image is is a little more somber a little more thoughtful a little more pensive with this image I might want to use it horizontally as a hero image on a website I'm going to set the crop to 16 by nine so now I'm going to set the crop bring it down to the eye line and bring the vertical Guide to the ridge line of the nose that's a better image if we come in a little closer bring the vertical Guide to the other side of the ridge line readjust so that horizontal grid line is across the pupils and then we have a new crop this feels like a good balanced composition for this image so let's take a look at this image with this image what I wanted I wanted very strong image a very strong composition and I wanted this right up here so what I'm actually doing is I'm using the nose here the ridge line of the nose as my guide for the composition because I want the eyes to not be balanced I don't want this photo to feel balanced I wanted to feel strong and intimidating I'm still going to use the ridge line of the nose for a compositional marker but I'm gonna crop in tight here on the eyes I'm really going to put the eyes out of alignment here here and cropping in tight on that head so now this photo starts to feel a lot more imposing the fact that the head is up in the corner and he's looking down on you it feels very imposing and then that is the final composition for the image and this image feels good it feels strong it feels balanced and it has the right intention for this image for this crop here I have an image from a recent acting headshot session that I did and what I want to do here is I'm going to start with a four by five because acting headshots are eight by ten so I'm gonna make this crop vertical and I'm going to bring it to the center of her face so the mask of her face is in this Center section and then I'm going to bring the crop in and you can see if I take this crop off it's it still feels heavy on the right here even though her face is centered I'm just going to bring that vertical grid line over the pupil of her right eye which is Cam the left and then take this off and now that image feels perfectly balanced it's good it's ready to go to post up on Actors Access or casting workbook or IMDb and and she can go ahead and use that it's important to note that this isn't going to work for every shot you have to use your best judgment so I want to take a look at this photo of Adam who's a client of mine he's an actor and I'm going to turn the Grid on and show you right now that you can see this grid line follows the nose it's a nice perfectly centered straight on shot but what I have with these horizontal grid lines is that they are following the mask of the face they're coming in across the brow and right across the chin so that gives this image a good balance a good distance and it becomes a great headshot Now using those guides we established earlier in that process that I established earlier and talked about earlier about how I set up my crops this is an IMDb crop so you can see I have the mask Square in the middle of the the center segment and that feels okay I think we can still do better I'm going to set this crop to four by five come in here turn to the cropping tool and then I'm going to go back to the pupils here rotate this a little and now I'm going to set to a single grid line run it right down the nose take a look and that feels like a good solid balanced shot that's a great crop and I think I'm going to leave it there so these are guides that you can use to help improve the composition of your images and the cropping of your images and your headshots this video right here will tell you how to price your headshots so check that out thanks for watching subscribe to this channel for more videos like this take care