How to make your own passport photos

This tip applies to Australia. You may be able to adapt these instructions for your country.


The reason I did my own passport photos was because a photo shop will charge you several dollars for a set of photos. You can get digital prints made for less than $0.20. That's a tremendous savings factor.


First of all, acquaint yourself with the requirements for Australian passport photos. Keep these guidelines in mind. Your photo will be rejected if you do not adhere to the guidelines.


Get the best digital camera available to you. A good lens is more important than lots of megapixels. Pose in front of a neutral coloured wall and have a friend take a selection of photos of you, to have a better chance of getting a good shot. It's best if the photos are taken from mid-distance, using optical zoom to centre on your face, to avoid wide-angle distortion.


A normal 15cm x 10cm print can hold 8 photos of 37.5mm x 50mm, so that is the target size. The aspect ratio is 3:4.


In the following I assume a computer with GIMP, NetPBM and JPEG tools (e.g. Linux). If you have some other operating system, you'll have to adapt the instructions for the tools available to you. Upload the photos and pick the best shot. If none of the shots are suitable, go back and redo the shoot.


When you have a good picture, open it in GIMP. Make any necessary adjustments in the contrast and brightness. Select an aspect ratio of 3:4 or 0.75 in the crop tool and select the head region so that the head height is between 0.64 and 0.72 (32mm to 36mm in the final photo). This comes from the guidelines.


Make a note of the size of the cropped region, then save it in PPM format. Say it's is called mugshot.ppm and the size is 1500 pixels by 2000 pixels. The following shell pipeline replicates it to make a 4x2 matrix, i.e. 6000 pixels by 4000 pixels, then scales it down by half so that the printing machine doesn't think the camera has 24 megapixels, in case it cannot handle such a high resolution, and finally compresses the PPM to JPEG.

pnmtile 6000 4000 mugshot.ppm | pamscale 0.5 | cjpeg > mugshot-4x2.jpg

Now take that JPEG to your photo shop in the usual way (USB flash key, CD-RW, upload) and have it printed. You can then slice the photo matrix with a rotary cutter if you have one, or with care, a pair of scissors.