Do your own passport pictures

Do your own passport pictures. Sure you can pay $13 but where's the fun in that?

Step #1: take a picture. It's best if you're in front of a white background.

Step #2: crop your head and upper torso. Most paint programs will allow you to select a square area by holding down the shift key while you drag the selection rectangle. If your head isn't centered, just make another selection.

Step #3: after cropping, resize to 2000x2000 pixels. That makes it 1000 pixels per inch for a 2" by 2" print.

Make sure that the head isn't smaller than 1000 pixels and isn't bigger than 1375 pixels. (Between 1 and 1 3/8" inch) If it's too large or small, recrop it.

Step #4: duplicate the picture 3 times horizontally and 2 times vertically. You may need to add some canvas area to the picture to do this. You should now have a 6000x4000 picture (3 pictures across and 2 down).

Step #5: go to the 1 hour photo place and print it as a 4x6.

Step #6: cut out the picture. I have a nice little mini "Creative Memories Personal Trimmer Paper Cutter" that works pretty well.

Some of the Kodak photo kiosk machines have a special function to do most of these steps, I remember using that a long time ago.

I'd like it if my digital camera could do this all "in the camera." It'll do all these other fancy things like panoramas etc, why not passport pictures? Have a mode with an overlay circle to frame your head in and then do an automatic crop.

One of these days I'm gonna figure out how to write a HTML5 canvas javascript application to do this.