Here comes the bride, digitally beautified

If your friends look impossibly young and wrinkle-free in their wedding photos, they may have been given a digital makeover. But are photographers taking liberties with the airbrush? asks EDEL MORGAN

WHEN A couple I know got their wedding photographs back from the photographer, they noticed that everyone looked a little strange in them – more baby-faced and dewy-skinned than normal and eerily translucent. They realised the photographer had performed wholesale digital plastic surgery and removed everyone’s lines, wrinkles and imperfections, even the priest’s.

The effect, they felt, was “freaky”, and they joked it was like an LA wedding where everyone had “work” done or been botoxed before the ceremony. Given the time it takes to Photoshop an entire wedding group, the photographer, a family friend, may have thought he was doing a nice thing, but the couple demanded that everyone’s crow’s feet and laughter lines be reinstated forthwith.

In his ambition to create a better product, the couple’s photographer may have been a bit over-zealous with his airbrushing, says photographer Peter Clayton, which can make the overall effect “plastic fantastic. If you take away all the crow’s feet and bags, the person becomes unrecognisable. The trick is to reduce them only by 50 per cent which leads to a dramatic freshening of the face.”

That their photographer didn’t consult them first might indicate he thought they’d love it; demand to improve on nature – even if it’s only on photographic paper – is apparently high, particularly for weddings. Photographer Dominic Lee of Priory Studios – who says he can make people look five to 10 years younger – has an in-house Photoshop expert who spends his day zapping clients’ under-eye bags and broken capillaries. “It’s a lot cheaper and a lot less painful than plastic surgery. We’ve a constant stream coming here because we airbrush. Some say ‘give me more’,” says Lee.

He says some people insist their pictures are left untouched. “But when the original one comes up, they say ‘No, I don’t like that’ because it shows what they really are.”

He airbrushes people without telling them “all the time. If a client has Dumbo ears we might reduce them without saying anything because to ask them is likely to cause offence. If it’s going to influence their decision about the picture we might reduce a spare tyre without asking.”

He doesn’t see this as taking a liberty. “Not when people spend thousands of euro per year on make-up to cover blemishes and blood vessels. Most people want to look at a really pleasant-looking photo.”

Airbrushing backfired, however, on a woman whose photo he took for a passport application. “She looked like she spent her life in Florida in the sun and was very wrinkled. She was 60 but looked 90. She asked me to airbrush out wrinkles but made the mistake of going into the Passport Office with her form and they wouldn’t accept it because they said the photo had to be recent.”

Of seven photographers interviewed, four say they have been known to digitally slim down a bride’s arm or narrow a shoulder line without consulting them. Most of the airbrushing work at Priory Studios entails making people look as if “they’ve had a good night’s sleep,” says Lee. This involves removing teenage spots and blemishes, softening facial lines, filling in broken teeth, darkening bald spots and smoothing skin tone. “Even little kids need it,” he says.

Anything too extreme in terms of image manipulation is usually at the request of the client because it is expensive to do. “I’ve given a girl longer legs and we get requests from people who are internet dating who ask for certain things because they want to meet people.”

He has also altered wedding and family photos to make it look like an absent loved one is in the group and he frequently removes ex-partners from family photos.

Several of the photographers interviewed said that clients will often half-jokingly remark, “make me beautiful” or “make me look slimmer”, so they don’t seem too self-conscious or self-obsessed. For some, a little digital trickery can mean the difference between hiding their wedding snaps away in the cupboard and displaying them with pride.

Conor and Alice Griffith from Dublin got married in December and weren’t happy with the photos, which were completely natural. According to Conor, they didn’t have “that perfect photo” of the day to hang on the wall. “We spent a lot on the photos but they weren’t quite right; they either had the wrong profile, or one eye closed or a shadow across someone’s face.”

They recently had new ones taken by another photographer. “There was a little bit of retouching involved but there are some fantastic shots. I have two broken front teeth and they were fixed,” says Conor.

To show what can be done with Photoshop, Priory Studios took a full length shot and a headshot of me and I watched as Vladimir Polivanov turned me into a more Hello magazine-friendly version of myself. In a process that took more than an hour and a half, he lengthened my legs slightly, gave me a J-Lo posterior, filled in a gap in my fringe, turned my hair red, opened up one eye and made both of them sparklier, removed thread veins and under-eye puffiness, gave me a fuller top lip, a tan, pink nail polish, whitened my teeth and dabbed blusher on my cheekbones.

Lastly, I was put through what Lee calls “the angel filter”, a process that gives a soft ethereal glow and which is often used on children.

PSYCHOLOGISTDr Gillian Moore Groarke, who specialises in eating disorders, says a lot of people are quite critical of airbrushing when it comes to celebrities, "but why one rule for celebrities and another for them? Cognitively it's giving out mixed messages. And in many ways could compound an already low self-esteem."

She says the demand to alter photographic images “stresses the pressure people are under”.

“I see eating disorders and the struggles people have in terms of having the perfect image. We need to educate towards self-acceptance. Sometimes we need to be vigilant if we’re neglecting ourselves and overeating, but that doesn’t mean making changes that are not real.” If someone manipulated her image she’d want to know. “Otherwise I might be lulled into a false sense of security.”

The Irish Professional Photographers Association says it does not issue guidelines to its members with regard to airbrushing and image manipulation. Its “a giant grey area”, says photographer Philip Leonard. “When you go to wedding fairs, you see sample photography that’s been airbrushed to hell, with people with the perfect hairline and whitened teeth, and it looks very fake. My view is that it’s better if it looks more natural.”

Peter Clayton believes the question of airbrushing is not “a matter of the client’s concern in most instances”, and says a good airbrusher will wield that brush minimally, or at least to an apparently minimal effect. “The phenomenon of clients requesting airbrushing of their wedding photographs is not just a sign of the widespread knowledge of its availability, but is also representative of the later marriages we have seen in recent years.

“I have never been asked, and never expect to be asked, by a bride in her early 20s about the possibility of airbrushing, but I have booked many weddings for this year – and none of the brides are in their early 20s . . .”