Passport photo at home

What almost every authority asks for

Rules differ from country to country and they get revised more often than you would think, so the first instruction applies everywhere: find the official page for the document you are applying for and read the current version of it. Do not take a measurement from a blog, this one included. What follows is the shape of the requirements, not the numbers.

Almost every specification agrees on these points:

• A plain, light, even background. White, off-white or light grey, with no pattern, no furniture, no doorframe and, above all, no shadow thrown on to it by you.
• Face square to the camera. Head centred, shoulders straight, eyes looking directly at the lens. Not three-quarters on, not tilted, not looking up or down.
• A neutral expression. Mouth closed, no smile, both eyes open and clearly visible, hair off the face.
• Nothing covering the head or the eyes. No caps or hats. Head coverings are normally accepted for religious or medical reasons as long as the face is visible from the bottom of the chin to the top of the forehead. Sunglasses and tinted lenses are out everywhere; ordinary glasses are banned outright by some authorities and merely restricted by others, so check that one before you decide to keep them on.
• Even lighting and natural skin tones. No red eye, no filter, no beauty mode, no retouching.
• A recent photograph. Most authorities state a maximum age for the picture, and it is shorter than people assume.

What is genuinely country-specific, and what you therefore have to look up yourself: the printed size in millimetres or inches; how tall your head has to be inside that frame and how much clear space goes above it; whether the photo is handed in on paper or uploaded; and, for uploads, the minimum and maximum pixel dimensions and the file size limit. Those are the numbers that get applications sent back, and they are exactly the ones no general article can give you.

There is one more paragraph worth reading in the original wording: whatever your authority says about digital editing. Replacing a cluttered wall with plain white is not the same thing as altering your face, and most rules on this are aimed squarely at retouching, filters and reshaping. Some are stricter than others. If yours reads as an outright ban on any editing, shoot against a plain light wall in the first place so that the background work is doing nothing more than tidying up an already plain background.

Shooting it at home

The background is the one thing you can fix afterwards, so do not waste an afternoon pinning up a bedsheet. Spend the effort on light, distance and resolution instead, because those three cannot be repaired later.

Light. Stand facing a window, on an overcast day if you can, or at a window that gets indirect light rather than direct sun. Direct sunlight gives you a hard shadow down one side of the face and makes you squint. Ceiling lights are the other trap: they come from above, so they drop shadow into the eye sockets and under the nose, which is what makes indoor snaps look unflattering. Face the light, never have it behind you, and leave the flash off. Flash brings red eye, a hot spot on the forehead and a hard-edged shadow on whatever is behind you.

Distance and camera height. Put the camera at eye level, roughly a metre and a half away, and get somebody else to press the shutter. That distance matters more than most people expect. A phone's main lens is wide, so at arm's length your nose sits far closer to it than your ears do and comes out enlarged, while the sides of the face fall away. It is the reason selfies rarely look like you, and several authorities say outright that the photo must not be a selfie. At a metre and a half the perspective flattens into something much closer to a proper portrait. If your phone has a 2x or 3x telephoto lens, use that and step back further still. Camera height matters for the same reason: held high it enlarges the forehead, held low it enlarges the jaw.

Resolution. Shoot with the standard camera app, on the main lens, at full resolution. Avoid digital zoom, which simply throws pixels away; avoid portrait mode, which fakes the background blur with a mask of its own and bakes that mask's mistakes into the file; and avoid every smoothing or beauty setting. You are going to crop hard into this frame, so each pixel counts. HEIC straight off an iPhone is fine: the image tools read it, apply the EXIF rotation and keep the colour profile, as they do with JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF and AVIF.

The rest of it. Stand half a metre or so clear of the wall behind you. You are going to replace that wall anyway, but the gap throws it out of focus and stops light bouncing off it back on to your neck, and both of those make the cutout cleaner. Wear something that is not white or very pale, because a light top against a white background leaves the edge of your shoulders ambiguous and prints as a floating head. Keep your shoulders square, hair clear of the eyes, and shoot fifteen frames rather than one so that you have a choice where nobody blinked.

Replacing the background with white

Cutting a person out of a photo is harder than cutting out a shoe, and hair is the reason. A shoe has a clean silhouette; a head has a few hundred strands whose edges are part you and part wall. How a tool handles those pixels is the whole difference between a photo that looks shot in a studio and one that has an obvious grey rim round the head.

That rim is a resolution problem rather than a matter of taste. Segmentation models run at a fixed input size, commonly 512 or 1024 pixels on the long side, so plenty of tools compute the mask on a shrunken copy of your photo and then stretch it back over the full-size image. One mask pixel becomes a block of a dozen image pixels, the boundary lands in the wrong place, and a ring of the old background survives the whole way round.

The second cause is that an edge pixel is a blend. Keep it and you keep a share of the wall colour with it, which is the halo you can see; drop it and the outline goes jagged and the hair thins out. Doing this properly takes two things: refining the edge at the photograph's real resolution, and estimating what colour the foreground would have been at those mixed pixels, separately from whatever was behind them. Skip the second step and a photo taken against a green wall keeps a green fringe along every edge the moment you drop it on to white.

Airpic's background remover computes the mask with BiRefNet, refines the edge at full resolution and estimates the foreground, which is why hair comes back without a rim. The longer version, including what to do with awkward edges, is in the guide on removing the background from an image.

For this job, pick solid white rather than transparency. A transparent PNG is the right master file when you are going to reuse a cutout in different places, which is why it is the default advice for product photography. An identity photo is the opposite case: it has exactly one destination, and every step between you and that destination is hostile to an alpha channel. JPEG, which is what upload forms and print labs expect, has no transparency at all, so a transparent PNG converted to JPEG can flatten to black instead of white. Print software makes its own assumptions about what sits behind the alpha. Ask for white in the tool and you get a flat, even white with no gradient and no shadow, which is precisely what the specification describes.

Then look at the result at 100 percent before it goes anywhere: the hair edges, the gap between a spectacle frame and the temple, the line where a pale collar meets the background. The comparison viewer has a button for viewing at full size, and thirty seconds there is cheaper than a rejected application.

Enough pixels, and the right file

Print quality comes down to a single number: how many pixels land in each millimetre of the printed photograph. Photo labs work at 300 dots per inch, so the sum is millimetres divided by 25.4, multiplied by 300.

Suppose the specification you have been handed asks for a 35 by 45 mm print. That works out at 35 / 25.4 x 300 = 413 pixels wide and 45 / 25.4 x 300 = 531 pixels tall, so the cropped file wants to be around 413 by 531 pixels and there is little point being under it. If your size is given in inches the arithmetic is friendlier: a 2 inch square at 300 dpi is 600 by 600 pixels. Take whichever size your own authority publishes and run the same sum on it.

The catch is that those figures describe the file after cropping. The official framing keeps your head and a little of your shoulders, which from a metre and a half away is a modest patch of the original frame, so the photo you start with has to be several times larger than the target. A 12 megapixel phone photograph, 4032 by 3024 pixels, has plenty in hand. A frame grabbed from a video call, or a picture a relative forwarded to you through a messaging app, usually does not, because the app resized it on the way.

So crop first, then read the pixel dimensions of what you are left with. If they fall short of the target, that is the moment to enlarge the image, and 2x is normally more than enough to clear it. Two warnings go with that. Enlarging adds resolution, not focus: a soft photo blown up is a bigger soft photo, so if the original is out of focus, reshoot it rather than trying to rescue it. And switch face enhancement off for an identity photo. It reconstructs facial detail, which is the one thing you do not want touched on a document whose entire purpose is to record your face as it is. The same arithmetic at poster scale, with more detail on resolution and print size, is in the guide on upscaling an image for large-format printing.

Saving the file. High-quality JPEG, sRGB. JPEG because it is what every upload form and every counter at the lab accepts, and high quality because compression artefacts show up worst exactly where this photograph carries its detail: strands of hair against flat white, and the eyes. Do not open, tweak and re-save the same JPEG half a dozen times either, since every pass re-compresses what the last one did. If the upload form caps the file size in kilobytes, do not solve it by shrinking the picture: set a target size in the compressor, which reaches a given weight in KB by adjusting quality and leaves the pixel dimensions alone. Compressing is free on Airpic, download included, so it costs you nothing to try a couple of targets and compare.

One practical note to finish on: a good many authorities will only accept photographs printed on photographic paper, so a home inkjet on plain paper is often a wasted trip. Check that too, and if you are going to a lab, send them the file sized and cropped exactly as the specification asks rather than letting a kiosk crop it for you.

Step by step in Airpic

The whole thing runs in the browser, with no account and nothing to install.

1. Upload the photo exactly as it came out of the camera. Full resolution, uncropped. JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, HEIC and AVIF all go in; the EXIF rotation is applied for you and the colour profile is preserved.
2. Set the background to white and process it. The tool offers transparent, white, black or any hex colour; white is the one you want here. Processing and the preview are free, so you can see the result before deciding anything.
3. Inspect the edge at full size. Hair first, then glasses, then the collar. If something is wrong it will be wrong there.
4. Download it and crop to the framing your authority publishes. Any photo app on a phone or a computer will crop to a fixed ratio; match the head height and the space above it to the diagram on the official page. The first full-size download each month is free; beyond that it takes a credit, and credits do not expire.
5. Read the pixel dimensions of the crop. If they are under the target from the section above, run it through the upscaler at 2x with face enhancement switched off, then check again.
6. Export a high-quality JPEG, and if the upload form has a weight limit, hit it with the compressor's KB target instead of resizing.

Because this is a photograph of your face destined for an identity document, it is worth being explicit about what happens to the file. It is uploaded, processed on a GPU inside the European Union, and deleted an hour after you download the result, one day at the very outside. It is never used to train a model, and there is no account sitting somewhere with a gallery of your pictures in it, because there are no accounts at all. The reasoning behind that is on the why Airpic page.

Take the photo, then start here: remove the background and export it on plain white.

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