Photo Lighting Basics for Face Analysis

Why your bathroom selfie confuses every face tool — and the three-light setup that fixes it, with nothing but daylight.

Face tools measure pixels. Bad lighting skews the pixels: half the face in shadow reads as asymmetry; a warm lamp reads as a skin-tone shift. This is the checklist FaceLab recommends before any upload.

Steps

1. Face a window with diffuse light (overcast sky is ideal). Never a window to one side — that alone fabricates a 20–30% asymmetry score.
2. Kill every other light source in the room, especially overheads at night.
3. Neutral or white wall behind you; no coloured walls reflecting onto skin.
4. No filters, no beauty mode, no HDR if you can disable it — HDR locally brightens half a face and corrupts tone readings.
5. Camera at eye level, arm's length. Looking up or down distorts the midface zone (nose enlargement is the classic selfie artefact).

Reading the result

Done right, left/right pixel difference drops to single-digit percentages and the tone reading (ITA°) stabilises — the season analysis becomes repeatable.

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