Headshots in glasses: reflections, frames and when to take them off

The question people ask is whether to wear glasses in a headshot. The answer is almost always yes, and then the actual problem turns up, which is that glass reflects things.

Keep them on

A profile photo exists so somebody can recognise you. If you wear glasses every day, you without glasses is a slightly different person, and the recognition fails at exactly the moment it matters, which is when you walk into the room.

There is also a subtler thing. People who wear glasses constantly tend to look faintly unfamiliar without them, even to themselves, because the frames have become part of the shape of the face. Removing them does not neutralise the photo, it changes it.

So: if they live on your face, they belong in the photo.

The exceptions are narrow. Take them off if you only wear them for reading and would not have them on in a meeting. Take them off if they are heavily tinted or photochromic and have gone dark, because eyes matter more than frames. And take them off if the only frames you own are broken, though that is a different problem.

The reflection problem

Glass reflects whatever is in front of it. In a portrait, what is in front of it is usually the light source, and the result is a bright patch across one or both lenses that hides your eyes.

Hiding your eyes is the worst thing a portrait can do. Everything else is negotiable.

The fix is geometry, not editing. The angle at which light reflects off a surface equals the angle at which it arrives, so if you change either the light’s position or the lens’s angle, the reflection moves somewhere that is not pointed at the camera.

Three ways to do that, in order of how easy they are:

Tilt the arms down slightly. Push the earpieces up a few millimetres where they sit over your ears, which tips the bottom of the lenses toward you and the reflection down and out of frame. This is what portrait photographers do constantly, it takes two seconds, and it is invisible in the final photo.

Raise the light, or move it off to the side. If the window is directly in front of you, turn thirty degrees. The reflection swings away with you.

Lower your chin a fraction, which changes the lens angle the same way tilting the arms does, with the bonus that it usually improves the jawline too.

Check as you go: look at the lenses in the preview, not at your face. If you can see your eyes clearly through both, you have solved it.

Anti-reflective coatings help, a bit

Modern lenses often have anti-reflective coatings, and they genuinely reduce the strength of reflections. They do not eliminate them, and they often leave a faint green or purple sheen instead of a white one, which is less obtrusive but still there.

Do not buy anything for a photo. Just move.

The other glasses problems

Frames cutting across the eyes. Heavy frames sitting high can put a bar across your pupils. Push them up your nose properly and check in the preview.

Distortion. Strong prescriptions shrink or enlarge what is behind them, so your eyes can look noticeably smaller or larger through the lenses than outside them. Nothing to do about it except know it is normal and not a camera fault.

Shadows from thick frames. Hard light makes frames cast a shadow across the eye socket. Soft light from a window mostly removes this, which is another reason window light is worth finding.

Smudges. Genuinely the most common one. Clean them before you start. Fingerprints catch light and look terrible enlarged.

What retouching can and cannot do

A small reflection can be reduced. A large one cannot be removed honestly, because there is no eye behind it in the file: the detail was replaced by a reflection of a window, and recovering it means painting an eye that was never photographed.

This is the practical reason the fix has to happen at capture. Ten seconds of tilting the frames saves an unsolvable problem.

What does help afterwards is everything around the glasses: the background, the lighting balance, the crop. And if the frames have picked up a colour cast from the room, that is correctable.

Try a photo here and check the result at the eyes first. If your eyes are clearly visible through both lenses in the original, the rest comes out fine.

Frequently asked questions

Should I wear glasses in a professional headshot?

Yes, if you wear them every day. Recognition is the photo’s main job and your frames are part of how you look.

How do you avoid glare on glasses in photos?

Tilt the arms down slightly so the lenses angle downward, and move the light off to one side. Both move the reflection out of the camera’s view.

Should I take the lenses out of my frames?

Some photographers do this for difficult cases. It is fiddly, risks the frames, and tilting them usually solves the problem. Not worth it for a profile photo.

Do anti-reflective coatings fix glare?

They reduce it noticeably but do not remove it. You still need to change the angle.

Can reflections be edited out afterwards?

Small ones can be reduced. A reflection covering the eye cannot be honestly removed, because the eye behind it was never recorded.