TL;DR: A Redditor cracked a prompt that turns a regular photo into a Marco Grob style black-and-white TIME cover portrait, using Nanobanana 2. No AI headshot app plastic skin, no weird features. Two separate prompts, one for men and one for women, because unisex versions kept making women look masculine.
Why the usual AI headshot apps fall short
u/flanmorrison tried “several AI headshot apps” and came away unimpressed. The usual problem: waxy skin, dead eyes, features quietly reshaped until the photo doesn’t look like you anymore. Anyone who has run a selfie through one of those $9.99 headshot generators knows the drill: you upload twenty photos, wait ten minutes, and get back a stranger wearing your clothes. The jawline shifts, the eyes get that glassy over-brightened look, and the skin texture goes from “human” to “video game cutscene.” So instead of trusting a canned app, they wrote their own prompt modeled on Marco Grob’s TIME cover work: simple lighting, direct eye contact, character over polish. Grob’s style works precisely because it doesn’t try to flatter. It shows pores, asymmetry, and the small imperfections that make a face read as real instead of rendered, which is exactly the opposite instinct most AI headshot tools have been trained on.
What makes this prompt different
A few details do the heavy lifting here:
- Identity lock: the prompt explicitly tells the model to keep facial structure, skin tone, eye color, and hairline untouched. Only lighting, background, wardrobe, and grade change. This is the part most people skip when writing their own prompts, and it’s the single biggest reason generic prompts drift into “AI-generated stranger” territory.
- Real studio lighting language: single 5-foot softbox, 30-45 degrees off axis, Rembrandt shadow, silver reflector fill. This is how an actual photographer would brief an assistant, not vague “professional lighting” filler. Naming the actual gear and angle gives the model something concrete to simulate instead of guessing at what “studio quality” means.
- Explicit anti-AI-tell constraints: no beauty smoothing, no symmetry correction, no whitened teeth, no fused hair strands. That’s the list of things that make AI portraits look fake, called out by name. Fused hair strands in particular is a giveaway most people don’t consciously notice but instantly clocks a photo as synthetic once you know to look for it.
- Separate prompts by gender: the author found unisex phrasing pushed women’s portraits toward masculine features, so the women’s version adds explicit constraints against a squared jaw, heavier brow, or shortened hair. It’s a small addition, but it’s the difference between a portrait that looks like the person and one that looks like a vaguely-related cousin.
Use Cases 📸
- LinkedIn or About page headshot without booking a studio
- Team page photos that need to look consistent across remote hires
- A polished author photo for a book, newsletter, or press kit
- Speaker bio photos for a conference site
- A quick refresh before a podcast appearance or press interview when you don’t have three days to schedule a photographer
Prompt of the Day
Here’s the men’s version, ready to paste into Nanobanana 2 (or Gemini) alongside a solid, well-lit reference photo. Front-facing, even lighting, no sunglasses or hats works best, since the model needs a clear read on your actual features before it can preserve them:
Goal: Transform the attached photo into a professional black-and-white studio headshot in the style of a Marco Grob editorial monochrome portrait, the TIME magazine cover aesthetic: simple, psychologically intense, character-first.
Subject & identity: The man in the reference image. Keep his exact facial features, facial structure, skin tone, eye color, hair, and hairline completely unchanged, same age, same build, instantly recognizable to people who know him. Change only the framing, lighting, background, wardrobe, and tonal grade.
Composition & camera: Classic head-and-shoulders crop, chest-up, eyes in the upper third of the frame. Hasselblad medium-format look, about 100mm equivalent, shallow but controlled depth of field.
Lighting: Single large 5-foot softbox slightly above eye level and 30-45 degrees to one side, gentle Rembrandt-style shadow on the far cheek, soft rectangular catchlight in each eye, subtle silver-reflector fill.
Background: Seamless studio gray, graduating to near-black at the edges.
Wardrobe: A dark, well-fitted crew-neck sweater in charcoal, black, or deep navy.
Style: Photorealistic, high-contrast neutral black and white, minimal retouching, no AI-portrait tells like waxy skin or over-sharpened halos.
Output: High-resolution vertical black-and-white portrait, 4:5 crop.
Swap in the women’s version from the original Reddit thread if you’re generating a portrait of a woman, it carries extra safeguards against masculinizing features.
Try it yourself
Grab a well-lit, high-res photo of yourself, paste this into Nanobanana 2, and expect to regenerate two or three times before it clicks. If the first output looks close but not quite right, don’t rewrite the whole prompt, just nudge the lighting angle or wardrobe line and rerun. That’s usually faster than starting over. Drop your before/after in the replies, we want to see who comes out looking most like a TIME cover.
Grob-style TIMES cover portrait / headshot prompt
by u/flanmorrison in ChatGPTPromptGenius