Comparing products for one specific destination
BetterPicA profile picture is the narrowest brief in professional portraiture, and comparisons aimed at it usually measure the wrong thing.
The conditions that define the brief
About forty-eight pixels, in a list of eleven other faces, roughly a second of attention. Everything follows from that.
Skin texture, eyebrows, glasses frames close in tone to hair, fine gradients — none of it reaches the viewer.
What to compare instead of realism
Whether the output holds contrast at small size. A headshot can be flawlessly photographic at full screen and dissolve into a grey shape in a list, which is the failure that actually happens.
The second thing to compare
Whether it still looks like the specific person. Plausible and identical are different targets.
The free step before any comparison
About half of the profile pictures people describe as unusable are decent portraits framed wrongly. Cropping costs nothing and settles it before any product decision is needed.