Prepare a Passport Photo

How it works

Four steps, and none of them change your face.

A segmentation model separates you from whatever you were photographed against. Your portrait and that mask are then each scaled to the dimensions of the format you chose — the portrait with lanczos, the mask with bilinear, because a sharpening filter applied to a mask produces ringing along the cut edge and that ringing shows up as a fringe in the finished photo. A plain white canvas is created at the target size, and you are composited onto it.

The pixels of your face are copied across untouched. Nothing is retouched, relit, smoothed, or reshaped. That is a deliberate boundary rather than a missing feature, and the rest of this page explains why it is the only defensible one.

The presets are sizes, not approvals

Three formats are offered: 600 by 600 pixels for the US two inch square, and 413 by 531 for the UK and Indian 35 by 45 millimeter standards at 300 dots per inch.

Those numbers are the easy part of compliance and the only part this tool can do. What it cannot do is judge head height as a proportion of the frame, eye line position, expression, whether your glasses reflect, whether your shoulders are square, whether the shadow behind you is acceptable, or whether the authority you are applying to has changed its rules since this page was written.

Every one of those is a real rejection reason. A photo at exactly the right pixel dimensions can fail on all of them.

Why nothing is retouched

Identity documents have a different contract from every other kind of portrait.

A profile picture is allowed to flatter. A passport photo is a reference that someone at a border will hold against your face, and the only thing it needs to be is accurate. A tool that smoothed skin, brightened eyes, or subtly narrowed a jaw would be producing a more attractive photo and a worse document — and it would do it invisibly, because those adjustments are designed not to be noticed.

So this workflow does not offer them, and will not. The background is replaced because the background is not you. Everything inside the mask is left exactly as the camera recorded it.

What to photograph

The mask is the part most likely to go wrong, and it fails on low contrast.

Photograph against a wall that is clearly a different tone from your hair and clothing. Dark hair against a dark wall is the reliable failure case: the model has no boundary to find and will either take part of your head or leave part of the wall.

Even, frontal light avoids the second problem. A strong shadow cast onto the backdrop behind you belongs to the background and gets removed with it, which is usually what you want. A shadow falling across your own face stays, and most authorities reject it.

Before you submit

Open the official requirements for the specific country and document, not a summary of them, and check the file against that page.

Print it if the application takes a physical photo, because a file at the right pixel dimensions can still print at the wrong physical size if the resolution metadata is not what the printer expects.

If anything is uncertain, a photographer who does passport work daily is a better answer than a second attempt here.

Publication gate

This page ships once the workflow has been run against a portrait on a contrasting backdrop, one on a low-contrast backdrop, and one with a shadow on the wall, with each output measured against the declared preset dimensions.