I did a shoot for a local woman directing a play in community
theatre. She's a rather large, heavy woman and was very concerned
about it...wanted me to do everything I could within reason to help
diminish the weight in the photo.
I know some are deadset against this sort of thing,
although I'm of a mind we are creating images at the behest of our
sponsors and should try to fulfill their wishes. The shot is for
the Playbill of the theatrical production she will be directing.
BooRadley
If she wants it done, then I don't have any problem with it. But I
would not use the method you used -- squeezing the image
horizontally -- becasue it alters basic facial features. Think of
the eyes, nose, and mouth as a fixed triangle that shouldn't be
altered.
Her weight shows mainly in two areas, the lower jaw and neck, and
the width of her body at the bottom of the frame. So I concentrated
on these, using the liquify tool to "tuck in" her jaw line. I
painted and cloned on separate layers to remove creases in the neck
and remove the large shadow below the line of her jaw.
Keep this in mind: Fat shows in one of two ways. Along the edge of
neck or cheek, it shows in the shape of the outline of that part.
Fat bulges the line out, so you push it back in with the distort
tool (or by simply painting with the dark brown below her right ear
(our left). Inside that outline, fat is shown by light and shadow.
A bulge catches the light on top and throws a shadow underneath.
When you reduce the shadow under the jawline, you create the
illusion that there's nothing above it to cast a shadow. If that
helps any ...
For the bottom of the image, I selected the right shoulder (our
right) copied it to a new layer, and used the transform > distort
tool to narrow it at the bottom. Then pasted a piece of background
over that, masked it out, and painted back in to reveal the new
shoulder line. Same for the other side, to narrow that a little.
Finally, I lassoed her hair from the top of the bangs up, and
around the whole right side. Copied that to a new layer and used
transform > distort to flatten the top of the hair a little and
make it "bigger" on the right (our right). That makes her face seem
a little smaller, I think. It would probably also help to do that
on the other side (our left), to make that a little fuller and
rounder.
--
~ Peano
