Styles
Renaissance Portraits From a Photograph
Renaissance portraiture is not a filter over a photograph. It is a different set of decisions: light from one high window, a dark ground behind the sitter, and skin painted in translucent layers so it glows rather than reflects.
What it does to a photograph
Repaints you with that lighting and those materials. Clothing becomes period velvet and brocade with visible weave, the background goes to a deep neutral or a distant landscape through an arch, and the surface takes on brushwork and the fine craquelure of aged varnish. Features are preserved through the repaint so the sitter is still identifiably you.
Which photo to use
Three-quarter angle suits it best, since that is how the period painted almost everyone. Soft, directional light in the source gives the repaint a head start; flat frontal flash is the hardest input.
What people use it for
Gifts and prints, profile pictures with a joke underneath, book and album covers, and anyone who wants to hang themselves on a wall without commissioning a painter.