Notwithstanding all the whales, witches, and werewolves that pop up in people’s stories, some of the hardest photos to find for my book cover work are actually the most mundane ones.

This is the twenty-first century; interracial couples and heavy women abound in this country, but for some reason not many of them find their way into a professional photo studio. Photographers have this thing for shooting photogenic white people on a strict diet of fruit and water, and they shoot them in sexy poses as they flirt with the camera half-naked. If photographers shoot any ordinary looking people, the poses are anything but sexy—a cheerful smile here, a comic pose there … nothing at all that would inspire the lust to buy in a browsing romance reader.

Little wonder it’s so difficult to find good stock photos for a contemporary romance featuring a BBW, which can mean either Big Beautiful Woman, Beautiful Black Woman, or both.

So I often find myself improvising.

Note the two images above—stock photo on the left, final cover on the right. The cover request had called for an elevator scene between a white man and a curvy black woman. Everything about the stock photo was just about perfect … except instead of a curvy black woman, it had a skinny white woman. I was frustrated by the time I found this photo because I couldn’t find anything that came even close, but this photo … not only was the setting right, but the clothes and pose were right. The only thing wrong about the photo was the woman herself. It was close, but not close enough.

So naturally I darkened her skin and made her butt bigger … because the photo I needed simply did not exist.

.

Now note this image.

After reading a cover request form describing the hero and heroine, this was the closest photo I could find to match.

He’s supposed to be athletic and muscular, with brown hair and sun-kissed skin. She’s supposed to be plus-sized and pale, with mahogany hair.

I don’t actually find many combinations like that in real-life couples, let alone in stock photo couples, but who am I to question the author’s belief that the likelihood of such a pair coming together is high enough for its own book, let alone an entire sub-genre of them? I usually see a really fit and attractive woman paired up with an ordinary looking man, and I never seem to find many books about that, but perhaps I’ve been looking in all the wrong places, both in real life and on the shelves. Who knows?

But anyway, she’s supposed to be plus-sized, and her arms look a little too lean…

…so here we go; I fatten up the arms a little.

The change has to be subtle—too obvious, and it loses its realism and its sexiness; the photo needs to look like I barely did anything to it, while still hinting at the heroine’s larger size.

And just like that, the woman has gained about twenty or thirty pounds.

This is not the direction most people want to make when starring in before and after shots, but my Photoshop diet program is mostly for those unlikely few who want to change the way they look without having to eat so much or give up their beloved exercise. These are the people who want double digits in their dress sizes.

And oh, yes. The cover request didn’t mention any tattoos, so I suppose I should get rid of them…

…so here we go. Gone are the tattoos.

That’s about when I start noticing that I didn’t make her plump enough. Her shoulder still looks rather thin, and she has knuckles showing. As far as I know, shoulders on a plus-sized woman are usually round, and knuckles look more like dimples; the fine bones and tendons in the hand don’t protrude from the back of the hand.

Collar bones are another dead giveaway; they’re very prominent on thin women and practically hidden on big women—which is moot in this case, however, because her collar bones can’t be seen in this pose.

The point is, she still wasn’t plump enough in certain places…

…so I made her gain about another five or ten pounds.

I’m sure if the model saw the work I’ve done here, she’d be very pleased.

“You have no idea how hard I’ve tried to gain weight. Simply no idea.”

People will come to me from all over, asking me to add fifty pounds to their weight. You know how the camera adds ten pounds? My Photoshop diet is a lot like having five television cameras on you.

You never have to eat again!

Trust me. It’ll be bigger than Jenny Craig. Maybe not as big as Kirstie Alley, who endorses Jenny Craig. Still, bigger than Jenny Craig is big enough.

But I digress. She has rings, and the cover request made no mention of rings…

…so voilà! No rings. Wala! All gone.

Once, I forgot to remove a bellybutton ring from a stock photo, but the author liked it so much, she added it into her story. I’m not always that lucky though, so if there’s no mention of rings, I take them off when I can. That’s easy.

But here’s the tough part. She’s supposed to have mahogany hair, and while it’s no big deal to turn light hair dark or medium hair fair, it is quite another thing to turn black hair into something else entirely. It can’t really be done without a whole lot of work, and even then sometimes it looks like crap.

I did it once with Eyes of the Wolf, where I turned the heroine’s black hair into blond, but it required quite a bit of finessing and painting, which isn’t always as successful.

It was workable in that case because there was enough contrast between her hair and the background; however, in this case, the heroine’s hair is an exact match for the headboard behind her.

Whatever I did, it wasn’t going to be easy…

…or pretty.

See, to me, this change looks obvious—not really enough, but still too much. I can only hope that the author will accept that mahogany hair can look quite so dark in the shadows of that room. Otherwise, I’d have to do some painting, which I don’t normally like to do when I’m tweaking a photograph because eventually it starts looking less like a photograph and more like a Frankenstein piece.

I pride myself on manipulating photos in such a way that people hardly notice it’s been manipulated, but sometimes a little too much tweaking breaks that fragile illusion that it’s an untouched photo, and I hate breaking that illusion.

But now his skin. He’s a little too pale here, even more pale than she is, and she’s supposed to be the pale one; he’s supposed to be sun-kissed.

Here he is, sun-kissed.

Tanning people in photos is actually quite easy. So is making them more fair. Heck, I’ve even made people blue. It’s not a big deal, really.

Skin color’s the easiest thing for me to overlook when searching for the right photo, or for anything really. Here I am, a natural golden tan color, and do I care that H.E. is pink? Of course not. Stick him in the sun too long, and he becomes a nice blistery red. Send him off for a nice deep tissue massage, and he comes back all black and blue. He’s versatile that way, and I like it like that.

But again, I digress.

The last change I had to make was with the hero’s hair color. I changed his black hair to brown, and while that little tweak was just as problematic as the mahogany hair, it came out a little better.

And here are all the changes—the before and the after:

Because the exact right photo for the cover didn’t exist … just like with most book covers.

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