Make your own passport photos

First stage is taking the picture Here's what the Passport Office requires:

• Two identical photos.
• Photos must be taken within last month.
• The photo must be taken against a light background (either white, off white, cream or light grey so that your features are distinguishable and contrast against the background).
• Clear and of good quality.
• Printed on low gloss, plain white photo-quality paper with no watermarks, embossing or printing on the back. Using professional or high-res inkjet printer
• Free from copyright (school photos are not acceptable)
• Unmounted 45mm high x 35mm wide. (do not trim bigger photos to meet this condition)
• Full face (without sunglasses and normally without a hat unless the applicant wears a head covering due to their religious beliefs or their ethnic background, which is acceptable)

As the image size is only going to be small you can use your digital camera's lower resolution setting of 640x480 pixels. Unless, of course, you want to take the photos for other uses too.

Take several photos knowing that you may get the subject blinking on one or two and they may prefer one expression over the others. Use the camera's lens a on the telephoto setting to ensure a tighter crop. If you use flash make sure the subject is fairly close to the background to avoid it being underexposed and very dark. You also have to watch for the shadows it will cast too (Photos with shadows will not be accpeted!). Here the subject was about 50cm from the wall. Notice it's turned out grey. The passport office would accept this, but we want a better picture in our passport. So we will brighten the background using an image editing program.

You probably haven't given it any thought yet but the 640x480 dimensions are not quite the same proportions as the necessary 35x45mm size we need, so when you reduce the image it won't be the exact size necessary. There's a useful trick that allows you to reduce the picture at the same time as making a crop.

In Photoshop when you select the Crop tool it gives you the option of specifying a fixed crop size to a necessary resolution. See the bar above. We've keyed in a 3.5cm width, 4.5cm height and 300dpi resolution. Now when you make a crop it will save the crop to the size keyed in the figures, doing the whole job in one go. The grey areas (top and bottom) in the photo on the right highlight the elongated proportions of the original 640x480 photo that will be cropped so that the photo ends up the right shape.

Use the Move tool to drag the picture into the top left corner. Then paste the second picture into place (Ctrl+V) and again move this so that it aligns up to the first pic leaving a small gap between the two that will be used to cut the pictures when printed.

As we're going the traditional passport booth route we've printed four on a sheet. Aligning the bottom two below the first two. The other two can be sent off to Nan and boyfriend for purse/wallet fodder! When you have everything aligned use the Crop tool to trim off any unwanted surround, again leaving a slight white border around the set of four photos for trimming purposes when printed.

When printed carefully cut out the two pics and send them with the filled out application form, passport, if renewing, and your cash! If it's your first passport one of the photos needs a signature on the back. There's more about that on the application rules. All we need to say now is make sure the pen is designed to write on the back - some inkjet papers will smudge the ink. Happy holidays!