Terra Taco

Passport Photo

March 6th, 2006

My passport is about to expire, so I needed a new passport photo. Being Dutch and all, I figured: why spent a 100+ Krones on something I can do myself for 2 Krones? The problem is that I don’t have any lighting equipment, just the build-in flash. The result is obvious if you look at the picture on the left: shadows and a dirty background. So here comes a very quick Photoshop tutorial on how to clean it up.

1. Select the Magic Wand Tool with a Tolerance of 30. Make sure Anti-alias and Contiguous are checked.
2. Click on the background.
3. Decrease tolerance to 10, select ‘Add to selection’, blow up the picture and fine tune by clicking on the areas you want to add (or visa versa by selecting ‘Subtract from selection’) until you’ve selected the whole background.
4. Click Select>Feather… and use a Feather Radius of 3 pixels. Click OK.
5. Click Image>Adjustments>Levels… and move the black slider at the bottom of the dialog box (under Output Levels) all the way to the right. Click OK.
6. Click Select>Deselect.
7. Done!

Now I just need some Tips on how to make that guy look better.

Entry Filed under: Me, Photography, Photos, Photoshop