Nobody has to hold the camera for you. A room with one window and one clear wall gives a better photo than most studios, as long as you get two things right: where the light comes from, and how far you stand from the wall behind you.
Choose the spot before you touch the phone
Walk around the room in daylight and look for a plain surface — a wall, a door, the back of a wardrobe. Smooth and light-coloured is ideal, but the colour is not critical: we replace the background with the exact one your document requires. What we cannot replace cleanly is pattern: a bookshelf, a curtain with folds, a poster. The edge of your hair against a busy background is precisely where automatic separation goes wrong.
Then find the window. You want to stand facing it, two or three metres from it, at a time of day when the light is bright but the sun is not shining straight in.
The setup, step by step
- Stand a metre from the wall. Close to the wall your shadow lands on it; a metre of air puts the shadow on the floor, out of the frame.
- Turn to face the window. Front light is flat and even, which is exactly what a document photo wants. Side light from a lamp splits your face into a bright half and a dark half.
- Switch off the ceiling light. Mixing a warm bulb with daylight gives you two colour casts on one face, and a light straight above you digs shadows into the eye sockets.
- Prop the phone at your own eye height. A shelf, an ironing board, a pile of books against a wall. Higher than your eyes and your face tilts back; lower and you look down at the lens.
- Step back to about 1.5 metres. Distance is what keeps your features in proportion. Anything closer enlarges whatever is nearest the lens, which is your nose.
- Use the self-timer and take several. Ten seconds gives you time to drop your arms, stand straight and settle your face. Take five or six and choose afterwards.
- Leave room around you. Head and the top of the shoulders in the middle of the frame, space above the hair and on both sides. Cropping inwards is free; a cropped-off crown is a retake.
Ready to try it?
Upload the photo you have just taken. Every check runs before you pay, and the watermarked preview shows exactly what you are buying.
Start nowNeutral expression, mouth closed, eyes open, head level, nothing over your face. Plain clothes in a colour that is not the background colour your document asks for.
If the room is genuinely dark
Open every curtain, turn on every lamp in front of you and move closer to the window before you do anything else. Raising the screen brightness does nothing for the photo, and the phone's "night mode" adds noise and softens the face. Flash is worse: it flattens you, reflects in glasses and throws a hard shadow onto the wall a metre behind you.
If the day is over, wait for the next one. Thirty seconds tomorrow beats an argument with an official next week.
What we fix, and what stays yours
We straighten the image, cut you out, apply the required background colour, place the head at the height your document specifies, resize to the millimetre and lay out a print sheet. We do not invent detail that the camera never captured: a blurred, dark or shaken photo cannot be honestly recovered, and an office would reject the result.
Every automatic check runs before you pay, and re-uploading a better attempt costs nothing.
Read next: six mistakes that get a photo rejected, or the phone-specific setup for iPhone and Android.