How to Choose the Photo That Becomes the Painting

Every portrait we make starts as a file on somebody's phone. The single biggest difference between a portrait that looks like your dog and one that looks like a dog is not the style you pick, or the print you order. It is the photo you send.

Here is what actually matters, in the order it matters.

The eyes have to be sharp

If one thing is in focus, make it the eyes. A painting can carry a soft ear, a blurred paw, a bit of motion in the tail. It cannot carry soft eyes, because that is where a viewer looks first and stays longest. Pinch to zoom in on the eyes before you send anything. If they go mushy, find another frame.

Light from a window beats every flash

Turn the flash off. Put your subject a few feet from a window, on a day that is bright but not blazing, and shoot with the light coming over your shoulder. Direct sun makes hard shadows and blown-out white patches, and a blown-out patch has no detail in it to paint from. Overcast afternoons are quietly the best light there is.

Get closer than feels natural

Most photos we receive are taken from too far away. The head should fill a good part of the frame. If you have to crop hard to see the face, so do we, and cropping throws away pixels you cannot get back. Take two steps forward and shoot again.

Shoot at eye level

A phone held at chest height looks down at a cat and gives you a portrait of the top of a head. Kneel. Sit on the floor. For a horse, back up and raise the camera rather than shooting up the nose. Eye level is what makes a portrait look like it was made of someone rather than at them.

What we cannot fix

Some honesty, because you deserve it before you pay rather than after:

• Motion blur. If the whole frame is smeared, there is no detail underneath to recover.
• A face turned away. We can paint a profile beautifully. We cannot invent the far side of a face that the camera never saw.
• Heavy filters. Beauty filters smooth away the exact texture — freckles, whiskers, wrinkles — that makes a painted portrait look like a person. Send the original if you have it.
• Very old, very small files. A 200-pixel thumbnail from a 2009 social account has about as much information as a stamp.

Damaged and faded prints are a different matter entirely — that is what Painted Kindred exists for, and it is a restoration job rather than a portrait job.

When in doubt, send two

Every studio in the house lets you see the work before you pay for it. If you are torn between two photos, try both. It costs you nothing but five minutes, and the difference is usually obvious the moment you see them side by side.

Find the studio built for your subject on the index.