Easy Tips for Photographing Food

- August 14, 2012

I had been planning on baking a new dessert to photograph for this tutorial but since returning back home there's been so many other things to catch up on that I haven't had time, so instead I cheated and bought this one little piece of cake from the Fresh Market here in Williamsburg.

As I do with most of my photography posts, I do want to give a few quick disclaimers. First, this is just how I do it and not by any means the "right" way to. I am just sharing my rather make-shift way to get some basic yet clean, crisp food images. Second, I took these on an overcast, rainy day so I am not thrilled with how they turned out, but I had already made Lillie and Lola wait a day to eat this and I was pretty sure if I made them wait another day someone was going to end up sneaking a bite, which would leave me with nothing to photograph. =) And third, although I do shoot most of my food related posts with this basic white backdrop, it's not my favorite way to. I prefer the look of a styled kitchen or dining room setting for food but those take quite a bit of time to set up and generally I have my two little helpers by my side while I am baking and taking the photos so using a basic white backdrop makes it much quicker and easier to set up and take a few shots that I know will be easy to edit later once they are in bed. So, although it's not necessarily my favorite look, it is so easy and I have to say the white backdrop does make for a bright, clean feeling which is always nice for food related photos.

Now that I've given my disclaimers, I will show you some pictures and then if you scroll down I will explain the setup and show you step by step the editing process for one of them. Wait until you see how easy it is!

Now here is the finished shot of the photo I will take you through step by step:

The first thing I did was set up two pieces of foam board that I broke in half a while ago (okay, not really in half, or even close to in half, although that was my intended goal when I broke them apart so lets just pretend that they are sort of even - haha). I placed one board flat and then propped the other one upright behind it. I normally do this on a table and prop the upright board in front of a mason jar or vase to hold it up. Because it was so dark and rainy, though, I had to take these on our back porch so I just used some pillows to prop up the back board. And that's it for setting up! How fancy! =)

Then I just crouched down and started taking pictures. Here is this one straight out of the camera.

This first thing I did in Photoshop was remove the line where the two pieces of foam board met. For this I used the clone tool. It actually wasn't necessary for this shot because I knew I was going to crop it, but I wanted to show you this step because quite often it is necessary.

Next I ran Pioneer Woman's Boost action at about 80%.

And then Florabella Collections Sharpen/Defog action.

And then I played with the curves. To find this in Photoshop CS5 just go to "image", then "adjustments" and then click on "curves".

And then I cropped it.

And there you have it!

Here are some other photos where I've used this processing on. You can click on the picture and it will bring you to the full posts for each one which include directions or recipes.