Choosing the perfect headshot background can make a huge difference in your photo’s final appearance. It can make or break the first impression, set mood, define personal style, and create the perfect canvas for your portraits.
When you are looking for a professional portrait image for your online profile, you may want to make it professional in anyways. However, there are several ways to ensure that you look professional in the image. One of them is editing with a headshot background that can turn your simple portrait photography into an outstanding one.
Don’t know what makes a better headshot background for portrait photos? This article will help you with all the instructions you need to create professional photo with excellent headshot background.
Let’s get into the discussion to learn how to do that:
What is a Headshot Background in Photoshop?
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A headshot background is a customized background used to add in portrait photos to make the photo look professional. It provides the best way to portray your personality in an image for a portfolio or anywhere you want.
Having a professional portrait photo is what you need for your LinkedIn profile and all your professional appearances. Getting a professional image may require you to go to a photographer’s studio and pay a few bucks.
However, if you don’t want to spend money, you can use Photoshop alternative way of processing headshot backgrounds. This is a cost-effective way of getting your professional image ready to use, and besides, you can do it for free if you know how to use Photoshop.
For your convenience, here we show how you can choose the perfect headshot background for your photo and replace any image background.
What Makes the Perfect Headshot Background for Your Portrait Photo?
Selecting the perfect headshot background for your image is a matter of personal preference and style. But there are some things that you should consider before making a final selection.
Let’s see what you need to do to get the perfect headshot background for your portrait photo.
Consider the Purpose
First, you need to consider the purpose of the photo and where you want to use it. For instance, if you are going to hang it on your LinkedIn profile, you should choose some highly saturated and bright colors, for instance, blue, black, grey, etc.
On the other hand, if you use it on other social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, you should add cheerful colors or random backgrounds such as image backgrounds to it. Using perfect image background, you can make your portrait image stand out and make a strong first impression.
Consider the Look You Want to Achieve
The background of your image plays an important role when it comes to creating a headshot background for your portrait. You probably know that different colors have different meanings and different emotional responses.
So, it’s really important to find the right background that best suits your needs. To do this, you must consider the look you want to achieve through the background and the overall image.
Light and Dark
Dark backgrounds tend to reflect professionalism and calm, while light backgrounds tend to reflect excitement and happiness. You can choose either light or white background for your portrait photo. Besides, you can play with different shades of dark and bright colors to understand which works best for your image.
Temperature
Temperature makes a huge impact on the overall feel of the photograph. For instance, warm colors such as red and orange are commonly used by photographers when they want to create feelings of intimacy, warmth, excitement, or sensuality.
Also, cool colors like blue, purple, and green are used to create feelings of tranquility and calmness. You can use these colors in different combinations to create the best temperature effect in your headshot photograph.
How to Replace Headshots or Portrait Backgrounds in Photoshop?
You can replace headshot backgrounds with the images you have captured through the smartphone. For this, you will need to create the headshot background manually with Photoshop. When the background has been created, you just need to drag and drop the image in that background.
However, if you aren’t familiar with using Photoshop, you may find it difficult to do this. To help you in this regard, we have described the entire process of how you can replace headshots or portrait backgrounds in Photoshop.
Let’s get into it:
Create a New Document
Start with creating a new document in Photoshop. Open Photoshop and create the document based on the size you want for the portrait image. This will create the background layer in the document.
Create New Layer
After creating the document, you need to duplicate the layer by pressing ctrl+J. It will make a copy of the background layer that you can see in the layer panel.
Remove the Background of the Portrait Photo
Now we have two layers in the document, we need to insert the image in the above layer. But before that, we need to remove the background from our image so that it perfectly fits on the custom headshot background.
Open your image in Photoshop and remove the background from the image using Photoshop background removal tools. Photoshop offers different background removing tools, use one that best suits your purpose.
Set the Background Color
Now we will set up the background we want to use in our headshot portrait photograph. Select the background layer, head to the left menu bar, click on the double color square, and set the background color.
Do some research with light and dark colors to decide the perfect background color for the image. Consider the matters described above while deciding on colors for the background.
Add Texture
If you don’t want to use color in the background, you can add texture and images as background which also gives excellent results if used perfectly. To use texture for creating a professional background, download texture images from stock-free sites. You can find a lot of texture images that can download for free online.
Add texture in the background layer and the object with a removed background in the foreground layer. Adjust the size, color, and transparency of the texture image and ensure that it perfectly matches the background.
Add Effects
You can also make some edits, such as lighting effects, brightness, hue, saturation, color balance, etc., to add depth to your background. It will help you create the best-looking background for headshot portrait photography.
Bottom Line
You can see the desired result with the headshot portrait photograph. That’s how you can create a headshot portrait photograph with Photoshop. Even if you are a beginner, you can easily create outstanding headshot portrait photographs following the above techniques.
