Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: BetterPic is one of the tools named below. Vendor figures are their published numbers as of 1 September 2026 and are checkable on their own pricing pages.
Every AI headshot generator sells its tiers on image count and turnaround time. Almost none of them sell on output resolution, which is the one spec that determines whether the file is usable for the thing you bought it for. Here is the arithmetic, because once you have it the tier comparison stops being a marketing exercise.
The only formula you need
Pixels needed = target print size in inches x DPI.
Print work is 300 DPI. So an 8-inch print needs 2,400 pixels on the long edge. A 3.5-inch business card headshot needs 1,050. A conference badge at 2 inches needs 600.
Screen work is different and much less demanding, because you are sizing to CSS pixels and a device pixel ratio, not to physical inches. A LinkedIn profile photo renders at 400 x 400, and 800 x 800 when expanded. A Slack avatar is smaller still. On a 2x display you want double, so 1,600 pixels on the long edge covers essentially every screen use you will ever have.
That gives two clean thresholds: 1,600 px for anything on a screen, 2,400 px for anything that gets printed at a sensible size.
What the tools actually output
- Aragon Basic: 896 x 1088. Executive: 1792 x 2176.
- HeadshotPro: standard JPEG, with a 4K upscale available on the $59 tier.
- BetterPic: 4K on every plan including the free one, plus TIFF export at 300 DPI.
Run those against the thresholds. Aragon's Basic at 1,088 on the long edge does not clear the screen threshold on a 2x display, let alone print — it is about three inches at 300 DPI. Its Executive tier at 2,176 clears screens comfortably and lands just short of an 8-inch print. HeadshotPro's standard output clears normal screen use, and the print case is what the paid upscale is for.
The point is not that one vendor is better. It is that the cheapest tier of at least one popular tool is sized below what a modern phone screen will show, and no listicle mentions it because listicles compare price and image count.
A warning about the word "4K"
"4K" in this market means roughly 4,000 pixels on the long edge, and it is doing a lot of work in marketing copy without being a standard. Two things to keep in mind.
First, an upscale is not the same as a native render. Upscaling a 1,024-pixel generation to 4,096 gives you a 4,096-pixel file, not four times the detail. It can look better — modern upscalers are genuinely good at faces — but it will not recover detail in the places these models are weakest, which is hair edges and the boundary where glasses frames meet the temple. Look at those two regions at 100% before deciding an upscale worked.
Second, JPEG at high resolution is still JPEG. If the output is going into a print workflow, you want a format without generation loss, which is what TIFF export is for and why it appears on spec sheets at all.
Where this leaves the choice
If everything you produce lives on a screen, resolution is a solved problem on every tool and you should choose on turnaround time and refund policy instead. Aragon and HeadshotPro turn around in about 30 minutes; BetterPic takes one to two hours, so it is the slowest of the three. All three publish one, and the conditions differ: HeadshotPro's has no expiry and no questions asked, Aragon's requires that you have not downloaded, and BetterPic's is 7 days and conditional on the model not yet having been trained on your photos. HeadshotPro's is the strongest of the three.
If any of it gets printed, resolution is the first filter and it eliminates the cheap tiers quickly. BetterPic is the one that outputs 4K natively at every price point with TIFF at 300 DPI, which is the reason to look at it here; Aragon's Executive tier is the other option that clears the bar.
And regardless of tool: check the output on your own face rather than the sample gallery. These models fail unevenly, most reliably on strong prescription glasses, tightly curled hair, and darker skin tones. That variance is larger than the variance between vendors, and it is not visible in any spec sheet.
Further reading
- How to get the best AI headshot: it is your upload set, not the tool
- Best AI headshot generator for LinkedIn: the spec everyone checks and the one that matters least
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