What a good photo looks like
Illustration from a photo works the way a portrait painter works: it can only draw what it can see. A face that is small, dark, angled away or half-covered gives it less to go on, and the result drifts towards a generic child. Five things do almost all the work.
- Front-facing. Your child looking straight at the lens, not three-quarters and not in profile. Eyes open and visible.
- Soft, even light. Stand them a metre from a window on a bright day, with the window in front of them. Indirect daylight beats both direct sun and a ceiling bulb.
- Face large in the frame. Head and shoulders. A face that is fifty pixels wide inside a wide holiday photo has nothing usable in it.
- Nothing across the face. No sunglasses, no cap brim shadowing the eyes, hair pushed back, no hand or toy in the way.
- Only your child. One face in the frame removes any ambiguity about which one to illustrate.
A plain phone photo taken next to a window on an ordinary afternoon is genuinely ideal. Studio portraits are not better, and heavily edited or filtered images are usually worse — beauty filters smooth away exactly the features that make a face recognisable.
What makes a preview come out wrong
Almost every disappointing likeness traces back to one of a short list of problems with the source photo. If a preview does not look like your child, check these before anything else.
| Side profile or head turned | Face shape and eye spacing get guessed, so the result looks like a cousin rather than your child |
|---|---|
| Backlit — window or sun behind them | The face is in shadow; skin tone and features come out flat or wrong |
| Dim indoor light | Grain and colour noise smear fine detail, especially around the eyes |
| Motion blur | Edges soften and the likeness generalises |
| Group photo | The face is too small to carry detail, and it is not always clear which child is yours |
| Sunglasses, hats, hair over the eyes | The eyes are the most identifying feature of a child's face; covering them costs the most |
| Heavy filter or beauty smoothing | Removes the small asymmetries that make the face recognisably theirs |
Fixing it takes one minute
With any personalised book worth buying, you should be able to regenerate the preview with a different photo before paying anything. At KuttyStory the preview is free and unlimited: upload another photo, generate again, and keep going until it looks like them. Nothing is charged until you choose to unlock the book.
- Take a fresh photo near a window, child facing the camera, head and shoulders in frame.
- Upload it in place of the old one and generate the preview again.
- Compare the two previews side by side rather than judging one on its own — differences are much easier to see in a pair.
- If it still is not right, try a photo taken at a different time of day. Light is usually the variable that changed.
Uploading two or three good photos of the same child, when a service accepts them, generally helps more than uploading one perfect one — more angles of the same face means less guessing.
A note on other people's children
If you are making a book as a gift, ask the child's parent for the photo directly. You need their permission anyway, they will pick a better photo than you would, and it saves you from cropping a face out of a group shot from a birthday party two years ago. Ask for the name spelled the way the family spells it while you are at it — getting the spelling wrong is the other thing that ruins a keepsake.