20 Portrait Background Ideas: Classic and Creative

When taking portrait photos, professional photographers often make the background soft and blurry to make the model stand out. If you take photos outside, you may capture a beautiful tree or a mountain range in the background to emphasize the facial features of your model standing in the foreground.

To make the background blurry, use a shallow depth of field. If you have a DSLR camera, you can easily adjust the depth of field in its settings.

A light-colored or white background will be a perfect solution for close-up photos, portraits, stock pictures, and product photos.

However, you need to set up lighting in the right way to ensure that the background looks white in your photos and doesn’t have a gray or yellowish tint.

Such backgrounds are used by photographers who take corporate portraits, family photos, or other types of portraits. To make your model stand out, choose a background of a contrasting color. You can use neutral-colored backgrounds, such as gray or tan, and then replace the background with another one during post-processing.

You can also use color backdrops for your portrait photos to give them a creative feel. If you don’t have extensive photo editing experience or don’t want to spend a lot of time on post-processing, you can contact the WeEdit.Photos team.

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A black backdrop is a perfect solution for those who need to take portrait photos for their portfolios.

To make your black-and-white portrait even more stylish, you can use low-key lighting and point a lighting source to the background. It will help you create a moody atmosphere in your shots.

One of the best portrait background ideas involves taking photos at the seaside. Your portraits will look stunning thanks to the sunlight scattered from the surface of the water. Incredibly beautiful portraits are obtained during sunrise or sunset, especially during the golden hour. I would also like to mention the rocky beaches, because the rocks create a good monophonic background.

If you don’t have a lot of time to process your photo, I recommend you to order our professional photo editing services. Make sure to entrust this task to WeEdit.Photos retouchers, and they will emphasize the strongest points of your pictures.

Those who have some experience can use such photo editing software as Photoshop and Lightroom. These programs will help you retouch your photos and perform color correction to make your portrait more attention-grabbing.

If you want to give your photos a creative feel, try using textured portrait backgrounds. For instance, you can ask your model to stand in front of a muslin fabric backdrop.

It will help create a mysterious atmosphere in your shots without distracting a viewer from the main subject.

If you started to take a portrait on the street and the sky is covered with clouds, don’t worry. It can also be a cool idea to take photos in such weather. After all, the clouds are a wonderful scatterer of sunlight. Black-and-white photos will have an interesting look in this case.

However, if you still don’t like the way your backdrop looks in your portrait photo, you can always remove it and replace it with another one. You don’t even need to use advanced photo editing software to do it.

To save time, you can also outsource this task to the WeEdit.Photos service. It will allow you to spend more time on shooting since our professional team will process your images quickly.

If you live in the city, it will not be difficult to find a good background for portraits or photos in other photography styles. It can be the simplest but also the most beautiful backgrounds, for example, wall, doorway, fountain and maybe even a street.

Outside the city, you can make a photo against the backdrop of beautiful nature.

Photographers rarely consider children’s playgrounds to be a perfect background for portraits. However, amusement parks with their many attractions can serve as an excellent portrait background idea. You can often see portraits with the Ferris wheel in the background.

When taking such photos, you should not blur the background very much. The silhouette of the wheel should be only slightly out of focus.

For those who like traveling, tourist attractions might be the best background for portrait photography. If you want the background to remain a part of your composition, then you need to take it into focus too.

For example, if you are photographing someone with the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the background, it would be nice to have it in focus.

The sky is one of the best backgrounds for portrait photography since you can use it almost any day. Regardless of the weather, this background will help you emphasize the facial features of your model and implement the most daring self portrait ideas.

Make sure to ask the model to stand in a place where the background will be clearly visible behind their back. It will help you take photos with a well-lit background and a perfectly exposed face without any harsh shadows.

If you think that newspapers are only for reading, think again. In case you have some old newspapers, you can use them as a stylish background for your portraits.

You can hang them on the wall and make the background slightly blurry to achieve a more eye-catching effect. If you have a huge collection of newspapers, you can stack them together to create a wall.

You can find a perfect portrait photography backdrop without leaving your house. You just need to find a cozy enough place, and bokeh will do everything instead of you. Also, you should look at cafes, hotels or shopping centers.

You can find quite interesting and at the same time not distracting backgrounds for portrait photos there, but you also need to find a person who could give you permission to take photos at these places.

Ironed or wrinkle-resistant bed sheets can serve as a portrait solid-color background.

If you want to give your images an artistic feel, you can also use wrinkled bed sheets. Thanks to their uneven texture, you can add some depth to your portraits.

When exploring beautiful locations, you can find a lot of picturesque nature backgrounds in your area that you can use to take stunning portraits.

You can take photos that are similar to the example below if you ask your model to pose in front of a bush or tree. This way, you can capture your model and bright leaves and flowers in the background.

While it doesn’t cost much, it can help you create a festive atmosphere in your pictures. However, you need to pay attention to lighting. Tinfoil is a highly reflective material, so you must be careful when using bright studio lights or other powerful light sources.

A DIY tin foil background can be used when there is plenty of natural light in the room. For instance, you can take photos during the day and ask your model to stand in front of the window.

If you like creating beautiful paintings, you can use your skills to draw mesmerizing backdrops for your photos.

An abstract painting with soft or neutral colors could be the best background for portrait photography. It will perfectly highlight the facial features of your model and help you take stunning portraits.

This idea might be a tad difficult to implement even in locations where there are many forests. When the light passes through branches, it might cast shadows on the face of your model even when the weather is cloudy.

It might be difficult to get rid of the shadows under the nose or eyes during post-processing. To avoid them, make sure to take with you a reflector or use a flash.

This idea will come in handy for those who are on a budget. To implement it, you just need to stretch a curtain away from a window and fix it to the wall. While it might look strange from afar, it will look stylish from up close.

You might notice some folds when you move the curtain away. Try arranging them to your liking to achieve a more striking effect. If you stand closer to the window, your subject and the background will be better exposed.

If I don’t have a basic solid-color backdrop at hand, I sometimes use MDF sheets when taking portraits. Using MDF sheets might be one of the cheapest background ideas for portraits. They look perfectly smooth in the frame, which allows me to color them in a different color during post-processing. This way, I can save money and use one background for different images.

You can find MDF sheets in local hardware shops easily. They come in different sizes and don’t weigh much, which means that you can take them with you anywhere and store them conveniently when you don’t use them.