Photography tips

One of the greatest advantages of using the camera on your smartphone is that it’s always so easy to access… but did you know there’s a shortcut you can use to activate it? Sometimes when it’s really crucial to capture a moment there’s no time to waste in unlocking the phone, finding the iPhone camera app and waiting for it to load. You can do this much faster by simply swiping up on your lock screen and tapping the camera icon.

If you feel like the image should be framed slightly differently, you can just crop it. Too many people worry about cropping images even a little bit because they think it would ruin the quality. Cropping your photos slightly, or even more than slightly, will not have a noticeable impact on how they look.

Another great way to adjust only a part of the image, particularly the colors in a certain part, is to use color mixing tools. Let’s say you want the greens to pop a little more than the reds. You can make that happen by selecting the green channel and adjusting it to your needs without changing the other colors at all.

If you feel like a certain part of the image needs to be adjusted, don’t change the settings for the whole frame. Use masking tools to adjust only the areas you want to improve.

Sometimes it’s the little imperfections that make an image look great. Maybe you left the spoon upside down, or a crumb fell somewhere you didn’t plan for. If it looks good, don’t worry about it. There’s no formula to perfection when it comes to photography so just create photos that highlight the food in the best possible way.

When editing, don’t overdo anything. Don’t go overboard with the saturation or the sharpness. Don’t push the overall tone too warm or too cold. Keep the images looking as realistic as possible so that you don’t end up with weird-looking food.

No matter which image editor you work with, chances are it will have some sort of tool to ‘heal’ your photos. Especially in overhead food photography, you will often see some tiny particles on or around your plate that would ruin the image. Removing them is usually pretty easy with such healing tools.

While it may be attractive to push that shadows slider way back to get a ‘moody’ photo, don’t do that. You should keep some detail even in your shadows to make the scene look natural. Otherwise, you might as well have shot the image in a lifeless darkroom.

There are some great food photography presets out there for Lightroom that you can use to quickly edit your photos when you don’t have a lot of time to dive into all the settings yourself. Presets give you a very good starting point for your edits and can often give you cool editing ideas too.