What makes a good photo for a personalized comic

The single biggest factor in whether a personalized comic looks like the person is the photos you upload. Not the art style, not the story, not the package. The photos. Here's what actually helps, and what quietly makes the job harder.

What works

• Faces lit from the front. Window light beats overhead light beats flash.
• Eyes open, looking roughly at the camera, in at least two or three of the shots.
• A few different angles — straight on, three-quarter, one where they're smiling properly.
• Photos taken in the same era. A face changes; a mix of 2015 and last week pulls the likeness in two directions.
• Close enough that the face fills a decent part of the frame.

What makes it harder

• Sunglasses, heavy hats, and hands over the face.
• Deep shadow across one half of the face — dramatic in a portrait, ambiguous in a reference.
• Group shots where your hero is one of six small faces in the back row.
• Heavy filters and beauty smoothing, which erase exactly the features that make someone recognizable.
• Very low-resolution screenshots or photos of photos.

How many to send

Three to six good ones beats twenty mediocre ones. More photos of the same pose adds nothing; two more angles adds a lot. If you only have one usable photo, that's still workable — just expect the likeness to lean on that single angle throughout.

A quick test before you upload

Shrink the photo down to about the size of a postage stamp on your screen. If you can still tell instantly who it is, it's a good reference. If it becomes an anonymous smudge, it will be one to the artist too.

About the details you actually care about

Scars, freckles, a particular pair of glasses, the gap in the front teeth, the tattoo on the left forearm — those are the things people notice first in the finished book, and they're the easiest to miss from photos alone. Mention them in the notes field. It takes one sentence and it's usually the detail that gets the biggest reaction.

The thing people point at is almost never the cape. It's the glasses, or the hair that never sits right, or the one crooked smile.