How to Take Perfect Pictures of Your Food

Restaurants, food trucks, bakeries, grocery stores, and various other establishments greatly benefit from the impact of their food imagery. It's crucial to ensure that your food photography lives up to customer expectations. 

You don't need to break the bank by hiring a professional photographer or investing in costly equipment to capture exceptional food product shots. Even beginners can produce high-quality photos using just a smartphone camera app. Below, we share our top food photography tips!

How To Take Pictures of Food Plates

• Prepare Your Food for Picture-Perfect Moments: Arrange your dishes to display their best qualities. Select complementary backgrounds and utensils. Position the main subject at the center of the plate, leaving space around the edges.

• Mastering the Art of Lighting: Opt for side lighting over front lighting. Whenever possible, utilize natural light, and opt for softer lighting when natural sources are limited. Be vigilant about avoiding shadows.

• Shoot at a 90-Degree Angle: Position your camera to be parallely right above your plate and ensure you are shooting in a landscape orientation. 

• Edit Your Food Photos Like a Pro: Enhance image sharpness, fine-tune the white balance to neutralize cooler tones while enhancing warmth. Slightly boost contrast, brightness, and saturation for that professional touch.

Prepare Your Food for Picture-Perfect Moments

To keep the viewer's attention on the food, start by placing the main dish at the center of your composition on a white plate. Then, arrange the sides and garnishes around it to create an attractive and symmetrical food presentation. Also, make sure the surface under the plate is a single color, ideally white, to avoid a cluttered look in the overall picture. 

Mastering the Art of Lighting 

Here are some steps to keep in mind to get the best lighting for your food plate. 

• Avoid light from the front or direct sunlight: Direct sunlight and front-facing lighting can create unwanted bright spots, harsh shadows, and obscure your food's texture, making it less appealing and less true to its flavor. This affects the overall visual quality of your food images.

Left: photo taken in direct sunlight, Right: photo taken in natural sunlight

• Avoid using camera flash: Avoid using flash, even in poor lighting. Flash photos can make your food produce harsh shadows and reflections. This causes very unnatural bright spots resulting in an unappetizing look.

• Use natural light: Getting a great food photo indoors with artificial light isn't impossible, but it might need some understanding of studio lighting. On the other hand, natural light, especially on cloudy days, is both bright enough to show your food's texture and gentle enough to avoid strong shadows. Ensure the food plate is not close to any windows and its at the center of the room. 

Shoot at a 90-degree Angle

Capture your food from a front-facing, downward angle since this is the initial view a person has when a plate of food is presented to them.

Edit your food photos like a pro!

After you've captured your food photos, it's a good idea to make some minor improvements using a photo editing tool. Just don't go too far with your edits. Making too many changes can make your food pictures seem weird and not yummy. But, making gentle adjustments to the colors and shading will make your photos look more refined and pro. Follow these common editing procedures. 

• Sharpen the image: Sharpening an image increases the contrast between adjacent pixels, giving the edges of your image a more defined look. 

• Adjust the white balance: White balance means how white things appear in your photo. Changing the white balance can make a picture look warmer or cooler, depending on what you choose. Using a warmer white balance will make the food look more delicious than using a cooler one.

• Increase the saturation: Saturation describes how strong the colors are in your picture. In food photos, keep in mind that richer and warm colors look tastier. Imagine the deep red of a juicy steak or the bright orange of a mango slice. Adding a small bit of saturation to a food picture helps make the colors pop and the image more tempting.

If you prefer a video walkthrough then visit this link.