Originally Posted by
Black_Dog
How much Photoshop is appropriate to use in photographing overweight people is an important and necessary debate. Here are my two cents:
The job of the wedding photographer is to make the bride and groom look their best. (Who am I kidding? It’s mostly the bride.) It is not to make the bride and groom look like people they are not or to make them unrecognizable. Fat or thin, beautiful or homely, the wedding photographer has an obligation to use whatever tools he has at his disposal to make the bride look like she is having a really good day.
The arsenal of tools a wedding photographer can use to flatter an overweight bride and/or groom includes technique (e.g. posing, use of camera angle, use of lighting, in-camera cropping), equipment (e.g. compressive attributes of telephoto lenses), and post processing (e.g. digital cropping, narrowing all or part of a photo to slim, adding shadow to deemphasize, lightening/darkening to emphasize [sculpt] features that might be lost such as chins and cheekbones, and using the liquefy filter). Any post processing techniques should be subtle enough that no one should notice that they have been done.
I do not believe that any post processing tools should be dismissed on principle due to the live nature of the wedding event. The photographer does not have complete control over the models or the lighting as he would in other circumstances. Key moments move quickly and there is no reshoot, so you are stuck with whatever you shot at the time. Photo editing software helps the photographer correct images to help bring them on par with what could have been achieved if the photographer had been able to carefully pose and light the bride and groom when they were exchanging rings, walking down aisles, cutting cakes, making toasts, dancing, throwing bouquets and garters, climbing into cars, etc.
Again, the goal is not to change what the bride and groom fundamentally look like, but to help them look their best.
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