Food photography camera settings for delectable shots.
Follow these pointers to take food photos that will make anyone’s mouth water — and edit them to perfection with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
Food photography is fun, creative, and produces striking results if you pay attention to subtlety. Set up the perfect food shot and employ some easy editing with Lightroom to entice everyone to join you.
Composition ground rules for food photography.
- Settings: As a rule, low ISO (your camera’s sensitivity to light) and fast shutter speeds (how quickly your camera takes a photo) produces the best quality images by minimizing noise, increasing focus, reducing blurs, and camera shake effects.
- Lighting: Sunlight — particularly filtered sunlight that’s created by shooting near a shaded windowsill or holding an umbrella over your food — will provide the most compelling lighting without washing out the food. Don’t try to create this effect by using flash — it can create unseemly glares and oily, unappealing sheens.
- Styling: Style your image with background dishes, ingredients or other utensils and props. This helps draw the eye toward the main dish while creating complexity and contrast.
Edit food photos with subtlety using Premiere Pro.
When you edit food images it's a bit different than editing portraits or landscapes. Making the food look realistic, fresh, and appetizing requires some subtlety in the editing process.
- Pay particular attention to contrast, exposure, depth, and cropping. You want enough contrast between light and shadow to avoid a flat-looking photo and cropping effects that highlight the subject while centering it in a creative way.
- You’ll probably spend most of your time tweaking the highlights and shadows to render the right mood and lighting effects. Clarity then helps bring out all the tasty details, while vibrance and saturation bring out color intensity.
Remember, no one wants to eat plastic food. Use natural effects to enhance the delicious features of your subject while still keeping it realistic and follow your instincts while editing.
Explore what more you can do with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to create your own food masterpiece.