AI LinkedIn headshots in a Barong Tagalog

The Barong Tagalog is formal Filipino professional dress. It is what you wear to work, to a wedding, to anything that matters. There are a great many Filipino professionals abroad — a very large number of them in healthcare — and essentially no headshot tool renders it properly.

If you wear one to work, it belongs in your LinkedIn headshot too.

What you usually get back is a white dress shirt. Sometimes a white dress shirt with some decorative stitching. Occasionally, and this is the worst one, a barong in whatever colour you picked for your outfit.

A coloured barong is not a barong

This is the mistake that gives it away, and it comes from the tool being helpful.

Every one of these tools lets you pick an outfit colour, and then applies it to whatever you are wearing. Navy blazer, navy kurta, navy shirt. Applied to a barong that produces something nobody owns: the garment is sheer piña or jusi in its natural ecru, and the colour is part of what makes it formal.

So the barong ignores the colour picker completely. It is the only other garment here that does, and black tie is the first — for exactly the same reason. Black tie means black tie.

The cloth and the pechera are named

The two things that make a barong recognisable in a headshot are the sheerness of the cloth and the embroidered panel down the chest, and both are asked for by name — piña, jusi, piña-seda, calado openwork, the pechera itself. The set varies across denser and sparser embroidery, a short-sleeved polo barong, a plain stand collar.

It is also worn the way it is worn: loose, untucked, over a plain white undershirt. Left unsaid, a sheer garment gets rendered against skin.

Whether all of that lands is a question for somebody who owns one. That review has not happened, which is why this page is a draft rather than a live one.

What else you choose

Everything except the colour: the room, the light, how close the crop sits, how much retouching. Glasses have their own tick box, worth using even when your own photographs show them.

How it works

Upload 8 to 20 ordinary phone photographs. Choose the look from pictures rather than words. Pick your favourites from a spread of previews and download those at full size.

What it costs

$25.00 for eight HD headshots. $35.00 for sixteen HD headshots. $49.00 for twenty-four HD headshots. Paid once, up front. More pictures later are $4.00 each.

Your photographs

Deleted after 30 days, along with everything trained on them. Not archived, not anonymised, never shown to anyone else.

Questions

Why can I not choose the colour?

Because the answer would be wrong. A barong is defined partly by the natural colour of the cloth, so offering navy would be offering a garment that is not this one.

Will it look like me?

Your face is learned from the photographs you upload, which is why we ask for at least 8 and why variety across them matters more than how good any single one is.

Is this the same as a polo barong?

The set includes a short-sleeved polo barong among the variations, so some pictures in a set may be that.