A plain white background, without a studio.

Take the photo right first

A good original matters more than any editing. Several exams now also take a live photo while you fill the form and compare the two, so the photo you upload should look like you on the day, in ordinary light.

1. Stand in front of a plain wall: white, cream or light grey. Avoid posters, doors, curtains, tiles and shelves behind you. A bedsheet pinned flat on a wall works if the walls are coloured.
2. Stand about half a metre to a metre away from the wall, not touching it. That keeps your shadow off the wall and away from your head, which is what makes a background look dirty or uneven.
3. Indoors, face a window so soft daylight falls on your face, and turn the flash off. A window behind you turns your face into a silhouette. Outdoors on a sunny day, IBPS says to keep the sun behind you or stand in the shade, so you are not squinting and there are no harsh shadows.
4. Have someone hold the phone at your eye level, about a metre away, and use the back camera. Front cameras and arm's-length selfies distort the face and cut off the shoulders.
5. Wear dark or coloured clothes if the wall is white. RRB asks candidates to wear non-white clothing for contrast with the background, and a white shirt on a white wall is also the hardest case for this tool.
6. Look straight at the camera with your face and both ears visible. No cap, no dark glasses. If you wear spectacles, tilt them slightly so they do not reflect the light.

Which exams ask for a white or light background

Each row comes from the official document in the last column, checked on the date shown. None of the notices we checked asks for a blue background, so use light blue only if your own form or office asks for it.

Exact wording in each document

IBPS PO/MT-XVI (same text in RRBs XV)

Make sure that the picture is in colour, taken against a light-coloured, preferably white, background.

SBI PO (CRPD/PO/2025-26/04)

Make sure that the picture is coloured and is taken against a light-coloured, preferably white background.

NEET (UG) 2026

The recent passport size photograph should be either in colour or black & white with 80% face (without mask) visible including ears against white background.

JEE (Main) 2026

The recent passport size photograph should be in colour with 80% face (without mask) visible including ears against white background.

SSC (CGL, CHSL, MTS, GD and others)

The major reasons for rejection photographs are : (i) Photo without plain background.

RRB (CEN 01/2026 ALP and other CENs)

Ensure to Dress yourself in non-white clothing, preferably in dark colours, to maintain contrast with the background

For SSC and RRB the portal takes your photo through the webcam or phone camera, so there is no file to edit. What helps there is the wall behind you when you take it. The SSC and RRB exam pages explain the live capture step.

Is editing the background allowed?

None of the notices above says you may not clean up a background. They ask for a white or light background, and NEET also rejects photos that look computer made. The NEET UG 2026 bulletin (PDF page 22) puts it this way:

Candidates may note that if the photographs uploaded are found to be fabricated i.e. de-shaped or seem to be hand-made or computer made, the application of the candidate will be rejected

NEET also matches your live photo with your Aadhaar photo, and SBI and JEE Main take a live photo during the application. So use this tool to turn a slightly grey or uneven wall into plain white, not to rebuild the picture. Keep your face, hair and clothes as they are, keep the edges soft, and check the result at full size. If the cut-out looks pasted on, retake the photo against a lighter wall instead.

Why exam photos get rejected

• The background is not plain. SSC lists "photo without plain background" first among its reasons for rejecting photographs, followed by caps, no shirt, a dim photo and blur.
• The photo was taken in the dark or against an improper background, or there is a shadow on the face. IBPS and SBI both list these in their don'ts.
• The face is too small. NEET and JEE Main want the face to fill about 80% of the photo, with both ears showing and no mask.
• The file is the wrong size or format. The portal refuses it outright. The tool saves a JPG and ticks the pixel, DPI and KB checks before you download.
• The photo looks edited. Hard, jagged edges around the hair or a halo of the old wall colour give it away. Raise the edge softness, trim the edge by a pixel, and keep "Remove old wall colour from edges" switched on.

How the tool finds the wall

By colour, the default: it samples a thin band along the top, left and right edges of the photo and fits a smooth colour model to it, so a wall that is brighter near a window still counts as one surface. It then spreads inward from those edges, taking in every connected pixel close enough to the wall colour. The tolerance slider sets how close. Because the spread starts at the edges, a white shirt in the middle of the photo is not touched unless it touches the wall with no outline between them. The bottom edge is left out by default because that is usually your shoulders.

Smart mode, which you switch on yourself, uses MediaPipe Selfie Segmentation, a small person-detection model published by Google under the Apache 2.0 licence. It is about 330 KB, is downloaded from this site the first time you use it, and runs in your browser. It handles busy backgrounds better, but it works on a 256 × 256 copy of the photo, so hair edges come out softer. In both modes you can fix mistakes with the Keep and Remove brushes.

To save the photo at a fixed size, the tool adds plain background on the sides of a tall photo instead of stretching your face, and crops the sides of a wide one around you. It then finds the highest JPG quality that fits the KB limit. For more sizes, the photo resizer has presets for every exam on the site.

Your privacy

Your photo is processed with your browser's canvas and never sent anywhere. Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged. The only extra download is the Smart mode model file, and only if you turn Smart mode on.

Common sizes

One-click presets for the sizes exam forms ask for most.