History Main / BeforeAndAfterPictures

You've got a product that you want to sell. What better way to sell it than showing what a difference it has made to your clients! This is especially true of beauty or health-related products, where the change might be visible. Of course, the change should be made to look as dramatic as possible. And we're not talking about merely showing realistic change - this is advertising!

Before and after photos are a staple of many sorts of advertisement, but especially diet drugs, er, we mean supplements. The need to make the change look as dramatic as possible leads to a number of standard features found in most examples, little cheats to heighten the change.

||be wearing unflattering clothing with muted colors. The clothing may be entirely too small so that it looks binding and uncomfortable, or too large so that it's baggy and shapeless.||be wearing fashionable, flattering clothing in bright colors.||

||have un-styled hair, typically flat, a bit frizzy.||have well-styled hair. If the subject is a woman, it may be significantly longer than it was in the before picture, or even dyed to a "sexier" color. If the subject is male, the hair will be cut shorter or in a more "masculine" fashion. ||
||DMV/mugshot-style pose: be standing up, but slouching, facing the camera straight-on (which does not flatter most people), with the arms hanging down at the side, perhaps pushing out the belly.||be posed dramatically, flexing (or sucked in), with the body at an angle to the camera, or perhaps engaged in some sporting activity.||
||be photographed in front of a boring background, possibly [[DeliberatelyMonochrome monochrome]] or looking like bathroom tile.||be photographed in front of an interesting background, possibly outdoors.||
||be lit in the most unflattering way possible, often with a harsh toplight or sidelight. Alternately, lit too brightly, so the color is drained.||be lit like a glamor shot. (It's amazing what a single fill-in light and a hint of back-lighting can accomplish.)||

||[[NerdGlasses Wearing ugly eyeglasses]]||[[TheGlassesComeOff No eyeglasses]]! (When the ad had nothing to do with vision correction.)||

Naturally, you're not supposed to think about how much better the Before picture would look with all the advantages in the After.

Cleaning product ads often use the same kinds of tricks to make one product look more effective than another.

Given that this trope is practically universal in the appropriate advertising, only particularly blatant examples should be listed.

This sort of play is especially annoying to the scientifically-oriented-folks in the audience, because, from a true comparison standpoint in science, you would want the before and after pictures to be as close as possible - same lighting, same angle, same facial expression, same clothes. The ad creators don't care, because they aren't going for a ''true'' comparison anyway, they're going for one that makes their product look appealing. Can be an EmbarrassingAdGig for people in the "Before" picture.

See also Administrivia/MultiPartPicture.

* The commercially released bleem! [[UsefulNotes/{{Emulation}} emulator]] used before and after screenshots of various UsefulNotes/PlayStation games to demonstrate whatever enhancements the emulator has to offer over real hardware. When the bleem! team was sued by Sony for copyright infringement over their use of game screenshots, they resorted to using stock images of real-world objects or mockup renders and cheekily admitted to it in the fine print, pixelating the "before" "screenshot" to make it seem as though it came off an actual [=PlayStation=].

||have un-styled hair, typically flat, a bit frizzy.||have well-styled hair. If the subject is a woman, it may be significantly longer than it was in the before picture, or even [[EveryoneLovesBlondes dyed to a]] [[HeroesWantRedheads "sexier" color]]. If the subject is male, the hair will be cut shorter or in a more "masculine" fashion. ||

||be wearing no makeup, or possibly makeup designed to make him or her look pale and drained.||be tanned, oiled, shaved, and made up by a professional to look their best!||

||be wearing no makeup, or possibly makeup designed to make him or her look pale and drained.||be tanned, oiled, shaved, and made up by a professional to look his or her best!||