How to create better headshots for your slides

Published in

SHARPN | Visual Comms

5 min readApr 1, 2021

Article title plus examples of headshots in coloured circles, accompanied by an animated sequence of the changes needed.

Sometimes you need to put faces on a slide. Perhaps you want to inject some humanity into an org chart. Maybe you’re bringing feedback to life. Or you could be building a profile on someone — perhaps even yourself.

The photos you have are likely to be of variable quality and style. One person may have provided you with a professional headshot (perhaps looking suspiciously younger). Others may have given you a lovely holiday snap or their Instagram profile picture. Assembled together, the inconsistency will reduce the quality and impact of your slides.

Here’s how to quickly fix that

The good news is that you can easily turn what you have into something that looks a lot more professional — and you can (nearly) all of it in PowerPoint.

Animated sequence showing the 5 steps described below, as applied to a simple org chart

Step 1: Remove the background

The chances are that you don’t have access to Photoshop, or the experience to wield it. And the remove background tool in Photoshop is terrible.

Before and after images of a photo of a woman with and without background

Luckily there is a great free website that will do it for you: remove.bg (bg = background). Easy to remember. The free tier gives you 50 ‘preview’ images per month; that size and resolution is fine for our needs. If you have several headshots to do, downloading the lightweight app will save you time.

A square crop of the head and shoulders of the woman in the previous photo

Step 2: Crop to a square ratio

This is the first step to making the headshots all look similar: getting them in a square (1:1) ratio.

A screenshot of how to crop in a square or 1:1 ratio

Select the photo
Picture Format > Crop > Aspect ratio > 1:1
Adjust the crop so the head and shoulders are centred and fit well within the square. If you do this with the white handles holding down Ctrl + Shift, you won’t accidentally squash or stretch the picture.
Press Esc or click away from the photo to apply the crop. You can go back and adjust the crop later if you need do.

There is no way to apply this to multiple photos at once. To save clicks, you can right click on the 1:1 menu option and add it to the Quick Access Toolbar.

You can stop here if this look works for you. But there are three extra steps that you should think about. These are all optional and independent of each other, although we think they work best together.. So pick and choose which work best for the look of your deck.

The same head and shoulders image of the woman above, but cropped into a circle

Optional Step 3: Make them circular

Turning the headshots into circular ‘badges’ is a really nice look, and incredibly easy:

Select all the photos (use Ctrl + click or Shift + click to select multiple items
Picture format > Crop > Crop to shape > choose the Oval

It’s important that you have already cropped to a square ratio, or you will end up with ellipse shapes. If you do have a squashed circle, just set the aspect ratio back to 1:1 as in Step 2.

Screenshot indicating which colour option to select to desaturate an image to balck and white

Optional Step 4: Black and white

Your original set of pictures will have been taken under different lighting conditions and at different levels of quality. Even once you have removed the background, they will still look quite different.

The easiest fix for that is to turn them all black and white:

Select one photo
Picture format > Colour > Saturation > choose the first option. This is 0% which means black and white.
Select the next picture and press Ctrl + Y (Cmd + Y on macOS). This will repeat the previous action, so will turn that picture black and white.

The circular crop image shown above, but with a coloured background applied

Option Step 5: Background colour

Adding a quick fill colour to the photo helps to even out all the photos by making them all appear the same size. If you are using a circular shape, it also shows the whole circle. Again, this is really easy: just apply a Shape Fill colour to the picture.

This works particularly well with black and white photos, and helps to apply some of your brand colours to the photos while making them look all very consistent.

Taking it further

Three versions of the coloured background option above using different shapes

While we don’t advise going crazy with this, you could try a different crop shape. Perhaps a rounded rectangle or a teardrop.

Bonus: reduce file size

Adding all these pictures in will inflate your file size considerably. Given that the pictures are not likely to be very large, it won’t hurt to compress them, and remove the bits you have cropped off to make them square.

Do this once you are happy with the final slide:

Select all the photos
Picture format > Compress Pictures
Check the Delete cropped areas of pictures box
Select the highest quality available from the list, and click OK.

More tips

Find more tips like this here.