Plastic surgery

Plastic surgery

Some girls do, and some girls don’t. And some photographers do, as well.

Now, without naming a product, I’m about to criticise the results it’s given me: possibly unfairly, because I’ve used default settings, and refinement is possible. For instance, for the lead image of Joely, I switched off most of the individual functions, and the result is a lot more natural than in other cases. But the skin is a bit Barbie, and the eyes a trifle manic…


A completely natural result of a model who understands very well that it’s about character as well as perfection works better, to my mind. We’d agreed to shoot ‘honest but kind’ images, and I wonder whether the processed version is either, in reality.



For the other image pairs in this article, I used the defaults including face-shaping. I chose Black Beauty and Lottii Rose because they, like Joely, are incredibly attractive. My thesis is that part of the attraction is in the ‘imperfections’ – the slight asymmetries, the occasional line, the distinctive nose or lips.



This is not, by any means, to say that the software is without its uses. There are probably many people who will prefer to see themselves as the software does, with the things that annoy them about their appearance ‘perfected’ – so I’ve used the plugin once in anger, so to speak, for a portrait of a middle-aged lady who was paying me to make her look more the way she wanted to be…



And while the default seems to be turned up to 11, there are possibilities with blending (providing you don’t use the shaping feature), and there are plenty of ways to modify the effects. But many people will use the default settings, I suspect.



As a control experiment, I shall attempt to take a portrait of my wife (who reckons I’m too slow shooting: I think she freezes in front of my camera, and not other people’s lenses). Anyway, I shall get some shots, and see whether she likes the perfected version…



After buying the software 18 months ago, I feel the need to explore it a little: and it may have a use one day. But on the whole, I shall stick to an unedited look, or use a different (and much more expensive) alternative that works on the skin and nothing else. Better still, it defaults to a much less idealised version: I’ve described the effect as burnishing, rather than softening.

But that’s a whole other blog, I reckon!