Two things decide whether a home photo works: where the light comes from, and how far you stand from the wall. Get those right and the rest is our job — we replace the background with the exact colour your document requires.
Light your face, not the room
Daylight from a window in front of you is the best light there is, and it is free. Stand facing the window, roughly two metres from it, at a time of day when the light is bright but not direct sunshine.
What to avoid:
- A window behind you. The camera exposes for the window and your face goes dark.
- A ceiling lamp on its own. It drops shadows into the eye sockets and under the nose.
- Direct sun. It makes you squint and burns out one side of the face.
- Mixed light — a warm lamp on one side and cold daylight on the other — which gives the two halves of your face different colours.
If the room is dark, turn on every lamp and move closer to the window rather than raising the phone's brightness, which only adds noise.
Stand away from the wall
A metre between your back and the wall is enough to keep your own shadow out of the picture. A plain wall in white, light grey or beige is ideal, but the colour matters less than you think: we cut you out and put the required background behind you.
What we cannot remove cleanly is a patterned background — a bookshelf, a curtain with folds, a poster. The edges of hair against a busy background are where automatic cut-outs go wrong, so give yourself a clear wall if you have one.
What we fix and what we do not
We fix the background colour, the crop, the size and the resolution. We soften uneven lighting a little. We do not invent detail that the camera never captured: if the photo is out of focus, too dark, or blurred by movement, no software can recover it honestly, and a document office would reject the result. Take it again — it takes thirty seconds.