Across 957 live Pixshop photo-look recipes, 85mm is the single most common focal length named in camera direction, appearing in 489 looks — 52.5% of the 932 looks that specify one. The next two lengths, 50mm and 80mm, each take another 13–15%, showing a strong, corpus-wide lean toward classic portrait focal lengths.
Method
This study measures spec.cameraLensFocus, the free-text camera-direction sentence stored in every look recipe under content/recipes/looks/, using scripts/recipe-stats.ts (pnpm recipe:stats). The recipe corpus holds 983 JSON files on disk, but 26 of those are orphaned recipes left behind by looks that have since been removed from the live catalog — they are excluded. The remaining 957 files match a live look across 106 packs, and that is the denominator for every count below.
For each of those 957 recipes, the script searches the camera-direction sentence for a two- or three-digit number immediately followed by "mm" (for example, "an 85mm lens"). 932 looks state a focal length this way; the other 25 describe the shot without naming one, and are left out of the shares in the table rather than guessed at.
Focal length is not a cosmetic detail. It sets how close the camera has to be to fill the frame, and how close a lens is to its subject changes the perspective on the face — a wider lens shot closer exaggerates the nose and flattens features toward the edges of the frame, while a longer lens shot farther back compresses them into more natural-looking proportions. Wikipedia's article on perspective distortion in photography covers the underlying optics in more depth. This distribution is consistent with the design of Pixshop's own Studio generation flow, which drives every recipe from a fixed camera direction rather than leaving focal length to chance per shot.
The measured distribution
| Focal length | Looks | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 85mm | 489 | 52.5% |
| 50mm | 143 | 15.3% |
| 80mm | 130 | 13.9% |
| 110mm | 115 | 12.3% |
| 35mm | 22 | 2.4% |
| 24mm | 6 | 0.6% |
| All other focal lengths (10 values, 23mm–200mm) | 27 | 2.9% |
Share is out of the 932 looks that state a focal length; the remaining 25 looks in the 957-look corpus do not mention one. Four lengths — 85mm, 50mm, 80mm and 110mm — account for 94.0% of every focal length Pixshop's recipes name, and all four sit in the classic short-telephoto portrait range rather than at the wide-angle end of a standard lens kit.
What this means for your own photo
If you are choosing how to frame your own photo, or judging whether an AI-generated headshot looks "right," this is why 85mm-equivalent framing reads as normal and a phone selfie held at arm's length often does not: a selfie is effectively a wide-angle shot taken very close to the face, which is exactly the distortion pattern professional portraiture avoids. The 85–110mm range Pixshop's recipes cluster around, across nearly every pack and profession, is consistent with deliberately sidestepping that effect rather than it being incidental.
Pixshop's catalog also includes an ID Picture pack of plain-background, formal-attire photos, which this study did not measure separately and which follows a different brief from the packs above. That pack and Pixshop's ID picture editor are built for resumes, company IDs, school records, and forms that request a formal photo. They are not a way to produce a passport or any other government ID photo: those require a recent, unaltered photograph, and most issuing authorities prohibit AI-generated or digitally edited images.
See Headshot Lighting Explained for how lighting choices interact with framing once the lens length is fixed. If you are staging your own reference photo for an AI headshot tool, standing farther back and framing tighter in post — the digital equivalent of a longer lens — will consistently look more natural than a close-up wide shot.