Every major authority refuses photographs that have been digitally altered. The wording varies, the intent does not: the image has to be a record of a face, because it will be compared against that face.
Why an edited face is a problem
The photo in a passport is a reference. At an automated border gate, a camera photographs you and a system compares the result against the stored image, measuring relationships between facial landmarks.
Retouching moves those landmarks. Slimming a jaw changes the face outline. Smoothing skin removes texture the comparison may use. Enlarging eyes moves the two most important landmarks in the image. The result is a stored reference that does not quite describe the person carrying it - which produces failed gate reads for the traveller, in the situation where they are least convenient.
What counts as retouching
- Skin smoothing or blemish removal.
- Reshaping any feature - jaw, nose, eyes, lips.
- Whitening teeth or eyes.
- Removing shadows under the eyes.
- Beauty filters of any kind.
- Composites, including a head placed on a different background as a hard cut-out.
What does not
- Exposure, contrast and white balance correction.
- Cropping and straightening.
- Background replacement, where permitted - and it is permitted by most authorities, because it changes what is behind you rather than you.
- Resizing and compression for an upload.
The line is simple to state: correcting how the photograph was captured is fine; changing what it shows about your face is not.
The modern problem
Phone cameras apply computational processing between the shutter and the file. Some of it is ordinary - noise reduction, tone mapping, sharpening. Some of it is not: many phones apply skin smoothing and subtle facial adjustments by default, particularly on the front camera, and some of it cannot be disabled after the fact because it happens during capture.
This means an honest person can submit a retouched photograph without ever having opened an editor.
Before taking an ID photo, look in the camera app for anything named beauty, smooth skin, portrait enhancement or similar, and turn it off. On phones where the front camera does this unconditionally, use the rear camera - which you should be doing anyway for distance reasons.
How it is detected
Partly by eye - smoothed skin has a characteristic plastic quality, and a hard cut-out leaves a visible edge around the hair. Partly by comparison, when a submitted photo is measured against a previous one or against the person at a counter.
The practical point is that the stakes are asymmetric: a slightly imperfect but honest photograph is accepted, while a flattering one risks the application.
Background replacement is the exception
Worth being clear, because people conflate the two. Replacing the background is normal and widely accepted - it changes the wall, not the face. What matters is that it is done well enough that hair edges stay natural, since a jagged cut-out looks like the composite it technically is.
IDShot corrects light and colour and replaces the background, and never touches the face - no smoothing, no reshaping, no whitening. The photograph that comes out is the photograph that went in, cropped and colour-corrected.
Requirements are changed by the authorities that publish them, and the official page is the only source that settles an argument. Each preset in IDShot links to that page, so you can confirm the current wording before you submit.