It’s been a long time since I posted anything and thinking back, I had to blame it solely on my busy schedule. Well it’s not really that busy it’s more of a normal routine like trying to remember everyone of my family member’s password, login IDs, company accounts, tutoring my younger sister in her weak subjects everyday, keeping track of important dates and events and at the same time recovering from a bad cold.

Ugh.. and never try to work while you’re having a bad cold and under the influence of cough medicine. I tried to work during my sick hours and unfortunately the only I managed to do was to stare at a sentence for 15mins, trying my best to comprehend the meaning.

Anyway I am recovered now and ready to blast at everyone. Well not fully recovered since I still couldn’t recall all the important details that I had chucked into my memory corner months back.

I did my own Malaysia passport picture and managed to save Rm12/ Rm10 for 4 passport photos. Most probably know that with more photo printers out in the market, it only take a few years or perhaps even weeks before users like me take the full advantage of the technologies we have at hand. I only wasted my ink, an A4 photo paper to get my 20pcs of passport size photo.

Steps to make your own Passport Photo.

1) Take a picture of your family members on a white plain background, preferably. Or if you don’t have a white background, get a plain colored wall of any color and snap your photo.

2) Load your picture into your computer. Open up Adobe Photoshop and open the picture.

3) Using a magnetic lasso tool, trace the outer part of your model (family member) until all of the outer part of your model is traced out. Then copy it (Ctrl C), open a new canvas and paste (Ctrl V) the copied picture into the new canvas.

4) Do some editing of your new picture like erasing some unwanted lines. If the picture is too dark, you can always edit the brightness by going to your top navigator bar: Image–> Adjustments–> Brightness/Contrast. Adjust the brightness and contrast as you wish.

5) Now unlock your background found in the Layers Window by double clicking on the Background Layer. Click on the paint bucket tool and set your foreground color to this hex number #096F96. Now fill the background layer with this color.

6) Now that is done, save the file both in Psd and Jpeg format. Let’s name this file as model.psd and model.jpeg.

7) Close all the canvases in the window and open up your model.jpeg. Make a new canvas of a A4 size format. Now this will be quite tricky.

On the empty A4 canvas, Press Ctrl R, to activate the ruler mode. Now you can see the rulers on both axis. Right click on the ruler and choose the option “cm“.

9) Going back to model.jpeg canvas, Press Ctrl A to select all and copy the image, Ctrl C.

10) Now head back to your A4 canvas and paste the image. Don’t panic if it’s too big. Bring your model.jpeg copied image to the end of the ruler where the 0cm dimensions are. Press Ctrl T, freeform transformation, click on the corner edge of the picture and press the SHIFT button. Scale down your picture until you have a height of 5.5cm.

11) Click on the Rectangular Marquee Tool. Shift your picture to the left by using your arrow keys on the keyboard and position it as how you would want your picture to look in your passport. Don’t worry about the picture being out of the canvas.

12) Once you are satisfied with how it will look, use the Rectangular Marquee Tool and click on the top edge of the picture where the ruler meets and drag it until you have reached the dimension of 5.5cm height and 4cm width.

13) Copy the picture and paste it on the canvas again. Delete the original one you did just now and keep repeating the paste instruction until you are satisfied with the amount of picture you wanted.

14) Arrange your pictures nicely with s bit of border for cutting.

15) Now save that A4 canvas as a jpeg file. Print it out and there you have it, your very own passport size photos! See the sample of my younger sister’s photo I did below.