Five briefs that are not the corporate one

Nearly all guidance about professional portraits assumes one destination: a company page or a professional network. For a large number of people the destination is something else entirely, and the corporate conventions produce a worse result.

Acting

The clearest inversion. An acting portrait is meant to show range and castability rather than reliability, which means less retouching, not more, and a neutral expression rather than a warm one.

Casting directors are looking for what you can be, not who you are, and a heavily corrected image removes exactly the information they need. Applying business portrait advice here actively hurts.

Visual artists

An artist's portrait is a sample of taste. It appears next to work, and if it looks like it came from a corporate photography session it contradicts the work.

The conventional advice — neutral background, even light, tight crop — is defensible but generic, and generic is the one thing the brief cannot afford.

Authors

An author photograph has the longest lifespan of anything in this list. It goes on a jacket and stays there for years, appears at fifteen millimetres on a spine card and at full page in a review.

That range is the constraint. It has to survive being printed very small, which pushes toward high contrast and a tight crop, and it has to hold up large, which pushes the other way.

Chief executives

A CEO portrait carries a requirement the others do not: it will be used by people other than you, in contexts you did not choose — a conference programme, a news article, a slide.

The practical consequence is that you need more than one crop and a version that works against both light and dark layouts. Almost nobody prepares this and everyone eventually needs it.

Commercial and advertising

Commercial portraits are the only category here where usage rights actually matter. A portrait for a profile is unproblematic under almost any terms; one used in paid advertising is not automatically licensed, and that distinction is buried in terms nobody reads.

Check before producing, not after.

What is common to all five

Only the geometry: contrast between hair and background, a crop that fits the display size, and light from the front rather than the side. The full index of contexts covers the rest, and the reason it is long is that the conventions genuinely differ — enough that following the wrong set is worse than following none.