Every six months or so, I have to get some photos or visa photos, and it is so complicated (and who wants to pay $30 per photo). So here is the workflow that works at home:
- You need lots of light when you are taking the photo. So, make sure you have some table lights, and make sure you don’t have any shadows around the face is the main thing. I find that even lighting left, right, top, and bottom is good.
- The free applications on the iPhone are great, called Passport Photo – ID Photo App. It is ad-supported, but it works well because it has the right framework and knows the standards
- Then go to iOS Photos and press and hold, and then Share it as a photo, and it will clip out the background
- Now here’s the tricky part, MacOS does not have any bit hacking tools. Last time we did this, we used Affinity Designer when it had a six month trial, but they’ve been acquired by Canva so that has disappeared.
- Instead,
brew install gimpwhich is an open-source photo editor, and this is a nice tool. Click on the Erase icon and then use “+” to zoom I,n and then turn down the radius, and you can get rid of the shadows that are around people. - Finally, you have to have to lay this out properly for display. The easiest tool I found is Google Slides, ironically for this. Save out the gimp thingy as a PNG and lay it out.
- Then you have to search to see what the required size is. For instance, if you are going to Europe, they will want a metric size, so what you do is to go to File > Language and set it to “English (UK)” and you will get rulers that are in metric. A common size is 35mm x 45mm and a 4×6 photographic paper can easily have 6 of these or more.
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