Short answer
Use one close, sharp, front-facing photo per person, head and shoulders filling a good part of the frame, even light from the front, no sunglasses and no hat. The clay render keeps your hair, skin tone, glasses and face shape but exaggerates everything, so a soft or distant photo comes back as a generic clay face that looks like nobody.
Try it with two photosMr and Mrs Stretchy photo guide
The render is about to turn you into clay with a nose like a banana — so the photo has to carry the parts that survive.
Updated 2026-11-04
The short checklist
- One person per photo. Two faces in one frame fuse into a single clay head.
- Close and sharp. Head and shoulders, not a full-body holiday picture.
- Face square to the lens, eyes visible, no sunglasses and no hat brim over the hair.
- Even light from the front. The kitchen is lit from the front, so a backlit photo stays dark.
- A couple photo is fine if you crop it into two, one face each, before uploading.
The clay look eats detail
This is not a face swap onto real footage. The render rebuilds both characters as clay, which means it keeps the broad shapes — your hairline, the colour of your hair, your skin tone, glasses, beard, the width of your face — and throws away fine detail by design.
So give it the broad shapes as clearly as you can. A photo where your face fills a third of the frame, in daylight, with your hair visible and no filter on it, comes back recognisably you. A photo where the face is 80 pixels wide comes back as a clay stranger with a nice nose.
Which seat should you fill
| Seat | What it does | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Left, photo one | Pours the coffee, misses the mug, floods the counter with milk | The partner with the more distinctive hair or glasses |
| Right, photo two | Tall in frame, leans in, thumbs-up at 9 s, arm stretch at 12 s | The only seat you get if you upload one photo |
If you are making a solo version, use the right seat. It is bigger in frame and it owns the two beats people actually remember.
What actually breaks
| Photo | What happens |
|---|---|
| Two people in one frame | Both faces average into one clay head on one body |
| A distant group shot | The face is guessed, and the result reads as a stranger |
| Sunglasses | The eyes are invented and the likeness disappears |
| A heavy beauty filter | The smoothing survives the clay render, so the face looks airbrushed and generic |
| A hat over the hairline | The hair is rebuilt wrong, which is the fastest way to stop looking like yourself |
| A dark or backlit photo | Skin tone goes muddy and the clay comes back a flat colour |
Splitting a couple photo
A photo of the two of you is fine as a source, but upload it as two crops. Crop each person into their own square with the head and shoulders filling the frame, then put the left-hand person in photo one and the right-hand person in photo two. Uploading the original photo twice gives the model two different faces for the same seat and it picks one.
If the face drifts back to the clay characters
- 1Swap in a sharper, closer crop of the same photo. This fixes it most of the time.
- 2Take off sunglasses, hats and filters before uploading.
- 3Run 720p rather than 480p: the clay render holds more of the face at higher resolution.
- 4If it still misses, the photo is probably too soft to carry a likeness, and a different photo is the answer.