Low-cost, easy-to-use alignment target generators for aligning a user's own face or eye to a camera or scanner are based on field-of-view visual feedback from a filtered or apertured planar light source. These approaches may be made agnostic to the scanner's operating system or other software. Alternatively, software on the scanner or its host device may create a solid light-colored section of an existing display screen to use as a planar light source. In some embodiments, the planar light source may be the virtual image of an object viewed in a plane mirror.
