Patna, July 18: If you are going for an arranged marriage, don’t fall for your prospective life partner just by looking at the photograph.

Trick photography is becoming popular in the state capital. Prospective brides and grooms are turning to photo studios to enhance their physical features through special software. Want to look fair, tall or thin, just explain it to the computer artist, and get a new look in 2D. The change is miraculous, often to the surprise of divorce lawyers in town.

Raj Kumar Mishra, a 32-year-old lawyer practising in Patna High Court, got a case where the wife sought separation from her husband for cheating her into thinking he was smart and good-looking. The woman gave her consent for marriage by looking at the husband’s photograph in which he had thick, black hair. However, after marriage she discovered that the man was bald and unapologetic about cheating her.

Mishra said: “The wife had no idea about the actual appearance of her would-be husband as the party had kept his real personality hidden with a digitally altered photograph. While in the photograph, the husband had a mop of hair, in reality, he was bald. The woman’s parents said had they known about the real looks of the man, they would have rejected him outright, as he was not at all a good match for their daughter who was fair, slim and beautiful.”

Mishra is not a stranger to such instances, personally. “When we started to look for a match for my brother, we came across a family, who fixed a meeting with us at four in the evening. But even then, we had to wait three hours to see the girl, who was finally shown to us in candlelight. The family had tried to keep us from seeing the girl’s face, which we soon found was completely different from the photograph sent to us. Thereafter, my brother made it a point to reject marriage proposals without seeing the girl personally. One of my friends also went through a similar situation where a prospective bride’s photograph was found enhanced,” he said.

Trick photography is proving to be a problem for people who still believe in the traditional method of selecting a groom or a bride by looking at their photographs. However, the photographers involved in the business are minting money, thanks to the craze for enhanced looks even if it’s not real.

The photographers often term their service as social work.

A case in point is Kedarnath Sahay, a 45-year-old employee at the photo studio, Daffodils. The studio at Mauryalok Complex has earned a good name in the market for their pre-marriage pictures.

Sahay said: “Everyone has one or two drawbacks in their looks which become evident in photographs. So, when it’s a matter as serious as marriage, a question of their life, people do not like to take a chance. They don’t want to lose a match only because of physical features and that is when they come to us, to help them remove any drawback in their physical features.”

Sahay said he always suggests his clients not to go in for drastic changes, as that can create problems later.

On the technology at hand, Sahay added: “We work both manually and on Photoshop. We can correct squints, add hair to a bald pate, shape eyebrows with our special finishing brush. With Photoshop, we can make the skin fairer and even trim down a person.”