In this Profile Bakery review, we assess the usability, accuracy, and quality of this AI picture generator tool. Intended to help the user generate high-quality headshots of themselves without the costs of hiring a photographer, does it live up to its claims?
Profile Bakery is an online service designed for those in need of fast and affordable headshot photography. Using AI technology to alleviate time and budget constraints, this AI tool aims to take the hassle out of organizing an in-person photoshoot. With AI-generated results, you can add a professional-looking image of yourself to your CV, workplace messaging apps, dating profiles, and online accounts such as the social networking platform LinkedIn. However, are these AI-generated images believable? That is, do they look like genuine photography, and do they look like you? Let’s put this AI headshot generator to the test.
Profile Bakery review – is it worth it in 2024?
- Extremely accurate likeness
- High resolution and aesthetic quality
- Suitable for professional use cases
- Generated 96 images in 1 hour in our case
- Provides a free CV template example with your image in-situ
- Free accuracy improvement tool accessible after generation
- May take up to 4 hours to generate
- Relatively expensive for AI
- Multiple upsells
- Some noticable AI-generated artifacts
How does Profile Bakery work?
On a technical level, Profile Bakery is an AI (artificial intelligence) tool that uses an image-to-image model. The model is essentially computer code that exists on the company servers. While you never see it directly, it’s the key ingredient in generating new and unique images that you can more or less recognize as yourself.
Having been trained with a large dataset of examples of human faces, the model knows how to take an input (an image of a human face) and produce an output (also an image of a human face). However, users of Profile Bakery don’t want just any image of a human face. They want an image of themselves with nice lighting, attractive backdrops, and natural poses. Now, all you need to do is provide a few examples of your face, and the software will aim to do just that.
Using Profile Bakery – my experience
In this review, we opted for the AI Pro package, delivering 96 images in total. The user experience is quite straightforward. This service does one thing, so you’d expect that it does it well. With an upfront briefing on what constitutes a good headshot, which you might recognize as the same guidance for a good passport photo, you’re invited to upload six to fifteen images of yourself. These should be the best photos you have of yourself, but include some background and perspective variety. After this, you’ll be asked for one final image of yourself; This should be your most perfect reference photo, with a completely unobstructed face, head-on, and with no distractions in the background.
You won’t find this last step included in all tools of this type, and it shows a promising level of care in the accuracy it will achieve. Following this, the step that asks you to specify your gender states that the Profile Bakery team is working on LGBTQ+ conform training, which is also a promising note that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
First impressions
The service appears clean and professional, with a functionally minimal UI (user interface). My first impressions of the example images shown on the website were very positive. In fact, you can see for yourself the before-and-after comparisons of selfies and AI-generated results with interactive sliders. The suggested use cases of headshots, application photos, portrait pictures, and profile pictures feel like a slightly insubstantial list of synonyms. Regardless, if it does a good job at that one thing, then this isn’t important.
Opting for AI Pro promises a minimum of 12 different styles, which you don’t get to choose. One style presumably means a combination of clothing and background, and having paid for 96 pictures, you might assume that you’d get an evenly divided eight images for each style. Here are my impressions of how well it handled expectations and the quality of each style.
| Style | Impression |
|---|---|
| Blue suit, indoor studio, closeup, square | Passable quality, high likeness, but not sharp enough. |
| Blue suit, urban outdoors, closeup, square | Passable quality, high likeness, but not sharp enough. |
| Blue suit, urban outdoors, closeup, portrait | Unrealistic saturation, and not sharp enough. |
| Blue suit, urban outdoors, mid shot with arms crossed, landscape | High quality, high likeness, perfectly sharp throughout. |
| Bluish grey suit, indoor office, medium closeup, landscape | Slightly uncanny, but sharp and high quality. |
| Dark grey suit, indoor studio, closeup, square | Passable quality, high likeness, but not sharp enough. |
| Dark grey suit, indoor studio, medium closeup, landscape | High quality, high likeness, perfectly sharp throughout. |
| White shirt, indoor studio, medium closeup, landscape | High likeness, and very high consistency between poses. |
| Black suit, indoor studio, black & white, closeup, square | Flattering expressions, but inconsistently sharp. |
The styles are not named or labeled, so finding the distinction between them comes down to a subjective visual assessment. All of the images I received can be summed up by the nine categories above. Having been promised twelve styles, I found the variety a little disappointing. It may well have achieved twelve styles in some barely perceptible way, but I found little distinction at first glance. The selection of ninety-six images included just one full-color image with a black suit and no outdoor images featuring a smart shirt without a suit.
Some images were only very subtly different from one another, but this could be either a pro or a con. Personally, I enjoyed being picky, having two images that would serve the exact same purpose, and being able to choose the expression or emotion that most represented me. The two images shown below, generated separately and then combined side-by-side, are a good example of this.
Accuracy of personal resemblance
Everyone has an innate understanding of what they look like, and AI has its work cut out trying to fool us. We’re incredibly perceptive about what we do and don’t classify as human (an ability that gives rise to the phenomena we know as an uncanny valley). Having embarrassingly shot and edited over 2,000 videos of myself in my career as a videographer, there’s not a hair out of place that will go unnoticed in my assessment — neither by myself nor by the AI, it would seem.
Profile Bakery excels in terms of personal resemblance, producing some of the most impressively accurate AI headshots I’ve ever seen. I was so impressed that my reaction was audible; Some of these could fool friends and family, let alone a stranger.
I’m aware that I have a subtly lazy eye, for example, which tends not to be as open as the other one in photographs. I also have a short tuft of hair that sometimes juts out at the front (depending on how my barber cut it that month). Both of these minor details, which represent details that other people may never notice about you, were accurately represented in the AI-generated images.
However, glasses were not well-represented. Despite six out of nine images I submitted featuring glasses, only one out of ninety-six results represented that (and it wasn’t very good).
Quality of Profile Bakery AI headshots
In a technical sense, the images are fit for purpose, but nothing exceptional. Square images were a resolution of 768×768 pixels (1:1 aspect ratio), with the landscape being 1152×768 (3:2) and vertical consisting of 768×1152 pixels (2:3). This is high resolution enough for the suggested use cases, and images tend to have enough space around the subject to crop for other aspect ratios if necessary.
Aesthetically, the images pass my quality assessment when used in small display sizes. Hair is often a dead giveaway, with AI algorithms typically struggling to represent hair textures as they appear in photographs. It was imperfect, tending to render beard hair and head hair differently, with the former looking coarse and the latter appearing smooth. However, this textural difference becomes indistinguishable in small display sizes, such as profile photos on a social media app.
Pupils are another common giveaway of AI-generation, but one that Profile Bakery manages to handle exceptionally well. Producing equally sized pupils at the center of each iris, our results were complete with realistic reflections in the eyes. This is true most, but not all, of the time. It’s only fair to say that not all of the images were usable in this respect.
It’s still clearly AI-generated, almost all of the time. This doesn’t disappoint me though — overcoming millions of years of evolved perception with an emerging technology is near-impossible. What impresses me is just how close it comes. It’s inherently hard to describe what makes something uncanny, or less than real, but here I believe it comes down to three main imperfections: Texture, focus, and sharpness.
As mentioned previously, hair textures vary within the same image, and the smoothness of the hair doesn’t quite sit right with me. In addition, the focus varies where it shouldn’t, with suits tending to be sharply in focus, while facial features are more blurred or otherwise less distinct (despite both being an equal distance from the figurative lens). This is likely because the facial features are the only customized part of the image — the model is acutely aware of what a suit looks like but only has a small handful of examples defining your unique face. Lastly, zooming in on any photo reveals less sharpness than you’d expect of a real camera (of course, there’s no camera involved here!)
In summary, I return to my claim that these images are at least fit for purpose. While imperfect, the artifacts I’ve described are less perceptible in small display sizes. Expect those who know you personally to call you out on it, though.
Face improvement tool
After reviewing your generated images, you’ll get the chance to enhance the likeness of those images for free.
The process is perfectly simple — upload a new reference image of yourself and then an image you’re unsatisfied with. The service will then regenerate the unsatisfactory image with a new attempt at recreating your face while keeping the pose, colors, and everything else intact. For this test, I used the only full-color image I’d received of myself in a black suit, which I was unhappy with in terms of likeness.
I found success with this tool to be hit-and-miss. If anything, my first attempt gave me something less flattering. However, with more attempts, I found more success, which is to be expected considering that a ‘good’ result is a very personal and somewhat subjective thing in this case.
Pricing
Profile Bakery offers the following three pricing tiers:
- AI Mini ($20)
- AI Regular ($39)
- AI Pro ($69)
The difference between these tiers is in the quantity of images you’ll receive and the variety of styles of those images. This is standard across the services of this type we’ve tried and perfectly reasonable. Less reasonable is the pricing itself, which we found to be on the high end for a service of this type. Starting at $20 USD for 30 images, including a minimum of 4 different styles, this one-time fee is equivalent to the monthly subscription price of some other artificial intelligence tools. However, the specialist nature of Profile Bakery AI headshot generator keeps it a viable choice, as the results will not necessarily be equivalent to any other service.
Include in the price of any of these three pricing tiers, you’ll receive simple CV templates, a job kanban board, a notice of termination template, and LinkedIn backgrounds. In other words, this service is fit for purpose, understanding the needs of its customers and how they intend to use the results.
Final thoughts – is Profile Bakery worth it?
In summary, I believe that Profile Bakery is worth the money for its intended audience. While expensive, it’s the only service I’ve tried that positively shocked me and had me questioning whether I actually took these photos of myself and forgot about it. In all seriousness, the accuracy of likeness is top-tier. The quality is hindered by some artifacts that do give away the AI-generated nature of the images, but in small display sizes such as CV photos and social media profiles, these artifacts become barely perceptible.
I could recommend it to anyone who exclusively has selfies of themselves or nothing more than smartphone photos at bars and parties but needs something more professional-looking. Before using any photos from public areas, I’d advise you to crop out anyone else from the image and to take some new selfies as you go through the process with Profile Bakery. Find a well-lit spot in your home, with lighting on both sides of your face and a plain background, and you’ll be good to go. Most of my training data was gathered this way in a quick and easy process that yielded very impressive results.
In case you are looking for AI platforms that can help you create headshots, check out our top picks for the best AI headshot generators.
