Printing passport photos at home or at a photo shop
, 4 min read
Photo studios charge for a set of passport photos that your printer, or any corner shop, can produce for a few rupees. The trick is laying them out correctly before printing.
Why a 4x6 sheet
4 by 6 inches is the standard photo print size, available at every lab and supported by home photo printers. A 35 by 45 mm passport photo is small enough that six or eight copies fit on one 4x6 sheet with room for cutting.
Passport Photo Print Sheet arranges the copies at exactly the right physical size, with thin guides to cut along, rendered at 300 DPI.
Before you lay them out
- Start from a sharp, front facing photo taken in even daylight against a plain light wall.
- Use Passport Photo Maker to crop to the official size for your document.
- If the wall is not white, White Background for Photos can replace a plain background. It works by detecting the background colour at the edges, so plain walls work and busy rooms do not.
Printing without scaling
This is where most attempts go wrong. In the print dialog:
- Set the paper size to 4 x 6 inches, not A4.
- Turn off "fit to page", "shrink to fit" and any auto scaling. Choose 100 percent or actual size.
- Turn off borderless if the sheet already includes a margin.
- Use photo paper and the highest quality setting. Plain paper absorbs ink and looks grey.
At a shop, hand over the file and ask for a single 4x6 photo print with no cropping and no auto enhancement. Auto enhancement can shift skin tones in ways some authorities reject.
Check before you cut
Measure one photo on the printed sheet with a ruler. It should match the required size within a millimetre. If everything is uniformly too small, scaling was left on. Fix the setting and reprint rather than trimming to fit.