Choosing source photos that hold up in an AI kiss
The scene decides the room, the light and the pose. Your photos decide whether the two people in it still look like themselves. A few seconds of checking before you upload saves more credits than any other habit.
What the generator actually takes from a photo
When you upload Person A and Person B, the studio is mostly reading faces: the jawline, nose, eyes, hairline and skin tone. Almost everything else in the frame, from the background to the furniture to the original lighting, gets replaced by the scene you choose. That is good news. A plain photo from an ordinary day can work as well as a professional portrait, as long as the face itself is easy to read.
The five-second audition
Before uploading, put each candidate photo through five quick questions. If a photo fails two or more, keep scrolling.
- Thumbnail test: shrink the photo on screen. If you can no longer tell who it is, the face is too small in the frame.
- Eyes test: both eyes visible and open, with no sunglasses, no glare on glasses and no hair across them.
- Angle test: the face is turned less than about a quarter away from the camera. A full profile gives the model half a face to work with.
- Light test: the face is evenly lit, without a hard shadow cutting across it or a bright window washing out one side.
- Edit test: this is the original file, not a smoothed, face-reshaped or heavily color-graded version.
Photos that look fine but cause trouble
Some photos pass a casual glance and still make the result harder. These come up again and again:
- Group shots cropped down to one person, which are often low resolution once cropped and can leave a stray shoulder or arm in the frame.
- Mirror selfies where the phone covers part of the face.
- Concert, club or neon-lit photos, where colored light shifts the apparent skin tone.
- Arm-length selfies taken with a wide lens, which stretch the nose and forehead.
- Scans of old prints with grain, fading or creases across the face.
- Big laughs or tongue-out faces. A strong expression can carry over into a scene that calls for something softer.
Pairing the two photos
Each photo can pass on its own and the pair can still look uneven. The most visible mismatches are sharpness and head tilt. If Person A is a crisp portrait and Person B is a blurry screenshot, the two faces can come out at noticeably different levels of detail. Aim for two photos of similar quality, with both people looking toward or slightly across the camera. You do not need matching backgrounds, outfits or lighting colors. If you only have one good photo of the two of you together, you can upload that instead, and the same checks apply to each face in it.
Rules that have nothing to do with quality
Every photo you upload must show an adult who has agreed to appear in a romantic image, and you need the right to use it. That rules out anyone under 18, childhood photos of people who are adults now, and pictures lifted from someone's social media without asking. A useful test: if you would hesitate to show the other person the finished clip, do not upload their photo. The full rules are on the content policy page at /content-policy.