Passport photos made cheap (make them at home)

September 30, 2007 – 8:29 am

So many different things these days require you to provide a passport sized photo of yourself (or even two) your driving licence, passport, student cards, bus pass, train pass and lots more, and it can get very costly popping into the little photo booths that you find in the post office and at railway stations and paying £3.50 upwards every time.

How much cheaper would it be if you could do it yourself? – Lots! Is the simple answer, and it’s dead easy to do too. You’ll need a camera that you can take the picture on and then upload an image from it to your pc, obviously you’ll need a pc, and then a printer & some photo paper. Well Camera’s that you can upload pictures from are pretty easy these days, as most of us have either a mobile phone with a camera on it, or a digital camera. You don’t need a fancy photo printer either, a regular inkjet printer that prints in colour will do you fine.

So take your picture of yourself against a plain pale background. In fact, take several because let’s face it you can! Now upload your pictures to your computer and have a look at them. Decide which one you want to use, making sure it complies to the passport photo guidelines that the government have laid out. As the image size is only going to be small you can use A reasonably low resolution setting of 640×480 pixels.

Ok, so now you have your picture, you will need to re-size it using something like photoshop. There’s a useful trick on photoshop which lets you use the crop tool and also reduce the size of a picture at the same time, what you do is when you select the crop tool, it gives you the option of specifying a fixed crop size to the resolution that you want. So if you select 35mm width and 45mm height and a dpi of 300 then crop out anything round the edges of your picture that you don’t want, your image will resize and be the correct size and shape. If you don’t have any photo editing software on your pc, there are packages online that you can use which will do this part of the process for you such as epassportphoto which does all the hard work for you. Personally I prefer to do this myself though as I’ve detailed above because that way I know that the picture hasn’t been distorted in any way.

You’ve now created your passport photo. All you need to do now is to place several of these side by side in a document (I prefer to use word, but you can use pretty much any package for this that isn’t going to distort the image or make it fuzzier). Place your photo paper into your printer, and you are ready to go.

One thing I like to do is several people’s passport photos at the same time – say for the whole family or something – All I do is place them side by side on the document with a bit of a white border between them, and then print them all out on one sheet of paper. It saves on photo paper as you can get quite a few on one A4 sheet of paper. If you do 4 pictures each for 4 people on one sheet of photo paper, you’ll have saved about £14 – a few pence you’ll have spent on the piece of photo paper.

by Vialdana