Shooting food is easy but there are rules

There is a photog that I follow on Facebook who is possibly the best wildlife photographer in Ontario. He is amazing.

Yet, when he shoots food, his pictures wilt. The images are often dark, the food poorly presented. His food pictures are not inviting. You don't long to sample the food shown.

If you are shooting food there are some simple things to watch for and often an image enhancement program is necessary to get the most from you images.

First, do not use straight on strobe. The light is ugly. Enough said.

Position your food near a large window to take advantage of the soft, even, available light. The window glass must not be tinted. You want clean colour. If there is a shadow, make sure it falls at the bottom of a least toward the bottom. No horror movie lighting (lighting from the bottom) is used here.

My point-and-shoots do not shoot images with the same quality as the pro equipment that I used when working. My point-and-shoots blow-out highlights; the detail in the tart crust was gone (but not forgotten.)

I took this image into Photoshop and using Levels made sure the brightest tones were maxed out (255) but not to the extent that important detail was lost. I set the dark tones in a similar manner. I made sure I had a clean black somewhere in the image. This gives your image excellent contrast. Make sure you don't go too far. You don't want too much contrast.

In Curves I brightened the entire image and I burned the edges of the image as I would have done in a wet darkroom in the past. There was a hint of a green cast in the image. I removed this in Curves, as well. I saturated the colours a little, a setting of 8 as I recall, and finally I used Unsharp Mask to gently sharpen the image (16-.8-3).

Oh, I also made sure the cooling rack bars were parallel to the edge of the image using select all, transform and skew. It didn't take much. It didn't result in the tart being distorted. You don't want to make huge changes using skew but your image can be tweeked quite successfully if you are careful.

Photoshop is not the only program I've used to pull-off this magic. I've also used ACDSee and may at some point switch over to this Photoshop competitor. Photoshop is simply too expensive. When my computer will no longer run my version, I will look at ACDSee -- or maybe GIMP. It's free!