Ben Cope is a photographer who conducted an experiment with 4 test subjects. 2 males and 2 females. He wanted to show how the camera perceives a person's body differently with just posture and lighting. This is one of the techniques that a lot of weight loss brands use in their products' before/after photos (of course with heavy photoshop). Ben is not using any Photoshop or image manipulation software.
How To Fake A "Before And After" Body Transformation Without Photoshop
by Eli Georgaras | November 16, 2014
For the before picture, Ben has his subjects take on a full frontal, frumpy pose in flat lighting. Even with full flexing, there are no shadows for the muscles to show.
By just adding dramatic lighting, Ben is able to add shadows to the pictures which dramatically changes the muscle tone and structure.
The test subjects' comments:
"My stomach looked totally different, it was crazy."
"It makes sense to me why they do that and why they contort their bodies."
"I've never realized the difference you could make with the light."
"Just total bullshit."
"You can set things up to look a certain why and make them look much better than they would walking down the street".