Photos on Eservices suggestions/need help

[mynetdude]

what is the best way to achieve the required dimensions 1 inch by 1.25 as required by NHQ I noticed it recommends shooting in portrait mode to create the "tallness" of your picture otherwise they get distorted.

[Pylon]

Take a photo meeting the requirements with any digital camera, then edit it afterwards to fit the specified size and aspect ratio.  Often, one way or another, NHQ does jack up the photo anyway even if you submit it meeting their specs exactly.  I submitted mine meeting NHQ's specs and it looks fine in E-Services; however when I get my photo ID cards, it's stretched disproportionately.  Signs of bad programs on NHQ's end, really.  Who sizes a photo to fit disproportionately?

[mynetdude]

well rather than WE having to size it to specs we should be able to submit a reasonably small 30-50kb photo no bigger than 640x800 or whatever and let the back end size it the way they want rather than US having to do it IMHO

[Al Sayre]

The easiest way I have found is to take a fairly high resolution photo with a large background area.  Then open the photo in the editing software tthat came with your camera, and set the crop tool to 1" x 1.5".  Center the cropped area just below the subjects lips, then crop and save it, specifying the file size or picture quality to end up at 30K.  The big background lets you crop a high res down and still have high res on your subject.  If you zoom in too much, you can't reduce the file size enough.

[mynetdude]

The easiest way I have found is to take a fairly high resolution photo with a large background area.  Then open the photo in the editing software tthat came with your camera, and set the crop tool to 1" x 1.5".  Center the cropped area just below the subjects lips, then crop and save it, specifying the file size or picture quality to end up at 30K.  The big background lets you crop a high res down and still have high res on your subject.  If you zoom in too much, you can't reduce the file size enough.

Not all camera software come with that "fixed" cropping feature. Infact not every photo editing software has that feature either.

I have a 6MP camera, so I can get a fairly decent size... I shoot at highest maximum res then I resize down to 640x800 which is small enough to work with, then I do a crop (this is where the problem seems to be without realizing it) then I resize to the final size.

So if I had a "Fixed crop" then that might work better because all the images in EServices are overly stretched.