Passport Photos

State Department has a bunch of new guidelines on passport photos. In the era of digital, even Kinko's now uses a digital camera to produce passport photos. So save yourself $15 and learn how to do it yourself!

1. Photo Print. Produce a 2" × 2"
2. Photo Composition. Laterally, the head should be in the center and the eyes should be 1 1/8" to 1 3/8" above the bottom. The head itself should be 1" to 1 3/8" high. The background should be white or off white with no shadows. Don't smile, but have a natural neutral expression.

So, how do you actually do this with a vanilla digital camera. It's not easy since the sizes are printed and it isn't so clear how to get it exactly right. Here's how I did it with Photoshop CS (I think Elements is similar) and Calvin's Fuji FinePix F10 6Mp camera:

1. Take a digital photo, try to leave quite a bit of white space. Digital cameras are 4:3 aspect ratio, but they need 2"×2", so you want to make sure the head is pretty small.
2. First, open the digital photo in Photoshop. It is going to be huge because the default is 72 lines per inch on the screen and the photo is 2200×3200 pixels. It is going to be about 30" × 40" in size!
3. View the rulers, so you can see sizes
4. That sizing doesn't matter, the first thing to do is to get the head size to be one inch. So, use the cursor to measure the actual dimensions. For instance, if your head at the top is at 10 inches and the bottom is at 25 inches. That means your head is 15 inches, so you need to shrink
5. Now click on coordinates are right on your nose. That is what they really want.
6. Click on the cropping tool and you want to get it so that the head is in the center line and then you go 15 inches to the left and 15 inches to the right. You essentially want a 30×30" square and press enter to crop.
7. Now you want to resize the image, it turns out that you just look at the width in pixels. Suppose it is 800 pixels because you've cropped, now you divide this by 2" (where you want to end up) and type 400 pixels per inch in the resolution box. This magically gets you to 2×2" without any additional work
8. Now check the dimensions on the picture. The eyes are the main trick. They need to be 1 1/8 to 1 3/8" up, for most folks, that works with your nose in the middle of the picture (which is why you set the crop box around the nose).

There you are a 2×2 passport photo!