Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Improved Passport Photos

As a follow up on my previous blog, I did some improvement on the technique I described of taking passport photos at home. There were two problems with the photos in the previous article. First the resolution was low, and second the background was not quite white due to shadow in the background. To fix the first problem, I made the following modification: Instead of scaling down the image as I described before, re-size the print size of the image. The new image print size should be reduced until the dimension from the bottom of the chin to the top of the head is about 1.05 inch. The rest of the steps are the same.
As for the background problem, make sure that the person stands about one to two foot away from the wall to avoid any shadows.
After the pictures are arranged on a 7x5 inch page, use the image adjustment tools to adjust the colors as needed. For example you can lighten the background to make it closer to white than the original photo by using the Curves tool.
The resulting photo should be much better than what I described before. Try it.