Knowledgebase: Take Better Food Pictures Without Photoshop

Advertising your business can be intimidating. For online food business owners, there is no better way to convince customers than mouth-watering pictures of your food. But taking pictures of food is tricky—colors may look dull, food slips out of shape, unsightly smudges in the background. 

Professional food photographers are skilled and use plenty of tricks to create dazzling, Instagram-worthy food portraits. You can always use photo manipulation apps, but for many people, it can be frighteningly complex. 

There are simpler ways to make food look absolutely scrumptious using virtually only your phone. Get the following tips right and you can make flavor and aroma practically ooze right out of the picture.

Style your food

If you’ve ever been to an upscale restaurant, you probably noticed that the food is prepared a certain way. In haute cuisine, food presentation is an art. You, as an online business owner, can do it as well! There are many ways to style and arrange food. However, there are some basic tips to keep in mind to create appealing food compositions.

Since you don’t have the luxury of providing taste or aroma, you will have to highlight textures in your dish to provide visual interest—the browned skin of roasted meat, waffle criss-crosses, sliced oranges, a dollop of bolognese sauce on top of pasta and so on. 

Avoid presenting food monotonously. A glass of milk or the smooth surface of a bowl of soup don’t usually make interesting subjects. The same is true for repetitive patterns. 

Garnishes of different colors can help break the monotony—adding banana slices or cinnamon on top of pancakes, adding a sprig of rosemary on roast chicken, a sprig of basil on top of tomato soup.

Pay attention as well to how you plate your food to play up to your intended effect. A plate with solid colors or simple patterns can draw attention toward the details in the food, while another that is too gaudy and colorful can distract from the food and into the plate.

Angles, angles, angles

Just like people’s faces, there are good sides and bad sides to a dish. A good angle shows a broad amount of detail of your dish and not just a small part. Your customers would want to have an idea of what’s in the food. To understand from what angle you should take a photo of your culinary creation, take aim at where the visual details are concentrated.

Taking a picture directly above, for example, works well for foods that have a lot of detail on a flat perspective—pasta, bread, grains, sliced fruit, noodles, pizza, pies, or cakes make good subjects for top-down photographs. That way, you can show a lot of enticing detail.

But a topside perspective wouldn’t work well for other foods that have more three-dimensional detail. It wouldn’t make sense, for instance, to take a top-down picture of a meaty burger. It would all be bun. A side photo of a burger makes better sense, where you can see the layers of luscious ingredients oozing with goodness. Other foods that would work well with side angles include meat, drinks, or stacked pastries.

Of course, there are no fixed rules and feel free to experiment as you wish.

Get a good background

Pick a background that draws attention to your food. As discussed previously, colors and patterns can distract from the food and into the background—you’re probably not selling countertops or painted walls aren’t you?

In a good photo, the plated food should stand out well from the background. For example, a dish of spaghetti, placed on a white shallow bowl, stands out well on top of a royal blue tablecloth or a dark wooden countertop. 

In contrast, carbonara on a white dish on a white table may look too bland. On the other hand, a plate of chicken placed on a countertop filled with all sorts of kitchen utensils might get buried in detail. Remember to harmonize the photo: make sure that the detail is concentrated on your food or the other elements in the photo don’t distract.

Unconventional backgrounds can also work! Arranging your dish in the frying pan or a wooden chopping board can make nice settings.

In some cases, you can actually zoom in into the food to totally exclude the background from the dish. It’s a bit tricky, but it can work.

Lighting and filters

Last but not the least, make sure that your dish is well-lit. Bright colors are generally appealing when you have good lighting to make sure the colors are visible. 

Daylight can be a good alternative to artificial lights because of its natural strength, exposing more colors of the food, although understandably, you have less control. 

But avoid light that makes your food cast harsh shadows. These shadows hide detail. Also avoid lighting that makes bright spots in your food for the same reason. Softer lighting is ideal and evenly exposes the details in your dish.

Lastly, you can turn to your phone camera’s filters if the light is not enough. This will be up to your taste but be careful of filters that desaturate (i.e. remove color) from your food!

At the end of the day, your goal is to make a photo that is truly mouth-wateringly and make your customers want to order from you. Food photography is a skill like any other, and as with any skill, practice makes perfect.