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People do not photograph badly. People are photographed badly by others. There's a phrase that I use with my clients, which is, "The camera doesn't add ten pounds, the -photographer- adds ten pounds." This is the A-number-1 reason why you tend to look better in professional photographs. We know how to make you stand and light you so that you look "better". We know our cameras and our lenses and make appropriate choices.
In school, we had hours and hours of training on how to use Photoshop to change the way that our subjects looked. And this was after hours and hours of training on the proper lighting for faces, the proper lenses for different circumstances, even the proper films for the clients that preferred it over digital. Not that you have to go to school to learn this, but someone needs to teach you or you shoot crap for a while until you learn it yourself.
Fact of the matter is that consumer point and shoot cameras don't have lens options. They don't have short versus long options - just close or far away. They have a direct flash, which looks good on about 1% of the things in this world that you'd photograph, like bugs - I wish that consumers had the same options that we professionals have. But they don't. They don't have the gear, they don't have the experience. So, HP comes up with a way to shortcut the procedures that we go through every day to compensate for the inherit drawbacks of the convenience of their products. This does not bother me.
We've been airbrushing pictures (or just flat out changing our negatives) practically since photography was invented. People should be smart enough to know that they can't trust pictures in magazines. Even catalogs do it. There are even some wedding photographers that offer a slimming service in their packages. Professionals that have ethical reservations about this practice normally choose not to shoot fashion or onbody work (catalog). Everyone else calls it "post-production".
Professionals (actors, models, and other celebrities) are accustomed to this - your image is your career - and you have a manager or agent that controls all of this. Your image is a creation, its own creature almost. It's why you get paid. Actresses get trained on how to walk down the red carpet, they are trained how to stand, how to walk, how to pose, -everything-.
For us, the little people, our lives are very different. I look at the whole thing from a more journalistic approach - when you cut it to the quick, every time you look at that picture of yourself - you are looking at a lie. A lie that you created. A lie you constructed, tweaked, and put into pixels. A lie that you distributed to others. A lie that you chose to make permanent. Are you okay with that? Then fine. If not, don't use it.
If you really want to tango with this - try talking to a photojournalist. Forget the whole women/body image thing - for them it's a slippery slope - When I change this person, am I changing fact or just making them more appealing? When I alter this image, am I creating a lie or just bettering the composition? Where does my responsibility for this image end?
