What Photo Should I Send for a Pet Portrait?

Send a sharp, full-size photo taken in daylight, with your pet’s face toward the camera and both eyes, both ears and the whole muzzle clearly visible. Get close enough to see fur texture, skip filters and costumes, and upload the original file rather than a screenshot. When in doubt, send a few and let the designer choose.

Why does the photo matter so much?

For a Retro Reverence portrait, your photo does one job: it shows how your pet looks. Coloring, eye color, and the markings a friend would recognize them by. The pose and the scene come from the artwork.

So you don’t need a professional photo, or a photo of your cat doing anything in particular. You need a clear one. The picture of your dog looking at you in the kitchen on an ordinary Tuesday is usually better than the blurry action shot at the beach.

What makes a good pet portrait photo? The 6-point checklist

1. Face toward the camera. Both eyes, the full muzzle and both ears visible. A three-quarter body turn is fine, as long as the face itself looks toward the lens.
2. Sharp focus. Zoom in on the face. If you can’t see individual fur strands, retake it. No motion blur.
3. Bright, natural light. Daylight or window light. No dim rooms, lamp glow or flash, because the designer needs your pet’s true colors.
4. Close enough. Near enough to see facial detail, with the whole head, ears and chest still in the frame.
5. Their natural look. No costumes, outfits or accessories. Collar on or off in the artwork? Say so when you send your photos.
6. The original file. Full size, straight from your phone. No screenshots, no filters, and no photos texted between phones, because texting shrinks them.

These are the same rules listed on the FAQ page, all in one place.

How do I take a good photo of my pet with a phone?

A few tricks that work on every phone:

• Go to the window. Put your pet near a bright window, with the light falling on their face, not behind them.
• Get down to their level. Crouch or sit on the floor. Photos taken from above make heads look big and bodies small.
• Use a sound to get the look. A squeaky toy, a crinkly treat bag or their name said in a silly voice. You get about one second of ears up. Be ready.
• Take a burst. Hold the shutter button. Out of twenty photos, one will be perfect.
• Tap to focus on the eyes. On most phones, tap the screen where the eyes are before you take the photo.
• Wipe the lens. Truly the most overlooked tip in all of pet photography.

Cats, of course, will cooperate at the exact moment you put the phone down. Keep it nearby for a day or two.

How do I photograph a black cat or a dark dog?

Black and very dark coats are the hardest to photograph, because phones tend to turn them into a flat shape with eyes. The fixes:

• More light than you think. A bright room in daylight, near a window. Evening lamp light won’t do it.
• Light from the side. Light that comes across the fur, rather than straight on, shows texture and shape.
• Tap on the fur, not the background. This tells the phone to expose for your pet. Then slide the brightness control up a little if the coat still looks like a silhouette.
• Avoid a bright background. A white wall or sunny window behind them makes the phone darken everything else.
• No flash. It flattens dark fur and makes the eyes glow.
• Send extra photos. For dark coats especially, a few different angles help the designer see subtle markings like a white patch on the chest or brown tones in the fur.

Black cats and dark dogs make beautiful portraits. They just need a little more light to show what they’ve got.

What happens after I send my photos?

After you order from the product page, you upload your photos at full size right in your order. Our own custom-built studio software places your pet into the scene, then a designer matches the markings to your photos and retouches by hand in Photoshop. A person does the matching, the correcting and the approval.

A digital portrait arrives within 3 business days of receiving your photos. Prints and canvases start with a proof, also within 3 business days.

To see how much a good photo matters, look at the before and after images on any product page. On The Bookend, a regular phone photo becomes a cat among old book spines, with every marking in place. Browse cat portraits or dog portraits to find your scene.