A well-shot headshot can be ruined by a bad crop. Too tight and you look like a mugshot. Too loose and it stops being a headshot. The crop determines whether the image feels professional or accidental.
Most platforms display headshots at small sizes and many use circular crops. Your framing needs to account for both.
The Standard Headshot Crop
Head and shoulders. The frame starts just above the top of the head and ends mid-chest. This is the default professional headshot crop and works everywhere.
Key measurements:
- Head room: Leave a small gap between the top of the head and the frame edge. About 10-15% of the image height above the head.
- Chin clearance: The chin should be roughly one-third from the bottom of the frame.
- Shoulders: Include enough shoulder to establish the body's angle but not so much that the image feels like a portrait rather than a headshot.
- Eyes: Position the eyes at roughly one-third from the top of the frame. This follows the rule of thirds and feels natural.
Cropping for Circular Displays
LinkedIn, Slack, X, Instagram, and most modern platforms crop profile photos to circles. This cuts off the corners of your image. If important details sit in those corners, they disappear.
How to handle it:
- Keep your face centered. Not just horizontally, but vertically too.
- Ensure the top of your head and your chin are well within the center 70% of the frame.
- Test: mentally draw a circle on your rectangular headshot. Everything outside that circle gets cut. Does anything important disappear?
- If you're providing a headshot for a platform with circular crop, deliver a square image. Rectangular images get center-cropped to a square first, then to a circle.
Common Cropping Mistakes
Too tight on the face. Cropping right to the hairline and chin makes the image claustrophobic. Leave breathing room.
Cutting off the top of the head. Surprisingly common in DIY crops. If even a sliver of the head is clipped, it reads as a mistake.
Asymmetric cropping. More space on one side than the other creates unintentional tension. Center the face unless you have a specific compositional reason not to.
Cropping mid-arm or mid-hand. If hands are visible, include them fully or crop above them. Limbs cut off mid-way look amputated.
Different crops for different platforms without adjusting. A LinkedIn crop isn't an email signature crop. At 80 pixels wide, you need a tighter crop than at 400 pixels. Prepare multiple crops from the same source image.
Aspect Ratios by Use
| Use Case | Aspect Ratio | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1:1 (square) | Displayed as circle | |
| Email signature | 1:1 | Tight crop, face fills frame |
| Business card | 2:3 | Portrait orientation |
| Speaker bio | 3:4 or 1:1 | Varies by conference |
| Website team page | 1:1 or 3:4 | Match your template |
| Book jacket | 2:3 | Portrait, tight crop for small display |
Tools for Cropping
You don't need Photoshop. Cropping is the simplest image editing operation:
- Preview (Mac) or Photos (Windows): Built-in, handles basic crops with aspect ratio lock
- Canva: Free, includes platform-specific templates
- Squoosh (squoosh.app): Browser-based, great for resizing and optimization after cropping
For a broader overview of headshot preparation, see our professional headshots guide. For platform-specific requirements, see our headshots by platform guide.
