Beautify Methods for Food Photography

Published by Color Expert Admin October 17, 2021

Use Egg yolk

The food photographers use egg yolk widely for making the foods look more appetizing. Yolk not only increases the beauty of a food but also improves the food value and taste. It’s combined yellow and orange color makes any dishes more lucrative.

Now imagine (you can do practically) a plate, fried chicken, some fresh vegetables, beans, etc. Keep your main food ingredient like chicken at the center of the plate and place one or two egg yolks just beside it. Keep the green vegetables around the items, scatter some beans, add some vegetable oils, and other edible elements you like.

If you feel everything looks good, use extra yellowish light before taking photographs. It will highlight egg yolk, fried chicken, and glisten other golden elements.

Use Jute leaves (Molokhiya)

To get healthy food photos that should also be decorated with green items, utilize the fresh jute leaves (also known as Molokhia). It will add greenish and give your audience a feel of fresh & healthy food.

Use jute leaves for food photography

If you shake off the purpose of food photo aesthetics for a while, molokhia will improve food quality and taste. It will make the food more appetizing and digestible.

For that glittering effect and healthy purpose combined together, you can use boiled leaves as they are with fishes, prawns, and other dishes. As a salad item, jute leaves are adorable. Make soup of green jute leaves by blending in a machine. Scatter the blended molokhiya , or fired and boiled salty jute leaves just with your main dish. The bouillon of jute leaves is shiny. Coming under soft photography lighting, they glitter and increase the image beauty. Such as glittering effect with jute leaves will make your photographs more alluring and engaging.

Use Honey

Want to make food images more juicy and attractive? Try to use honey. Keeping your chief food items below and make dropping down the honey from a high will create an unearthly beauty.

Use honey for food photography

Not only that, place honey-jar beside your main photography food item. Throw light from just the opposite direction. Honey will get highlighted and create a yellowish tint on a dark background.

Adding honey increases food value as well as image beauty. In terms of food decoration, you need not always pour honey on the foods; rather just placing honey jar, bottle, spoon with honey, etc. can heighten the food image aesthetic. Bread plus honey and some fruits give the audience a must-try attraction to the food. So, as a professional food photographer, do some food garnishing experiment with honey.

Use contrasting color utensils

During photography, the same color background should always be avoided. It restricts the photography item to come into focus. In the long run, your food photography purpose may be destroyed. In such a situation, you can use different colors backdrop for food photo shooting or later remove the background in Photoshop.

Expert food photographers suggest using contrasting color utensils in lieu of the same color. Search in good for numerous ideas and follow the steps for choosing the right color food container for taking photos.

Black, gray, golden color food require white utensils
White color foods need gray, black, or other contrasting color platforms
For reflection shadow, use a glassy backdrop
The wooden platform can be used.
Black or green background is useful for background removing flawlessly.
Multi-color designed utensils will increase image quality.
For dry food items, papers and clothes are ideal to keep the focus on the main subject.

Use of different oils

Honey and oil can serve the same purposes. But for fried food photography, edible oil provides the photographers extra opportunity to shoot frying moments. Food ingredients in hot oils while bubbling will energize the taste and even you cannot restraint yourself from being a food decorator to take a hot item into the mouth.

To increase food image beauty, you can use any oils like mustard oil, castor oil, vegetable oil, olive oil, soya bean oil, coconut oil, cod liver oil, and many more. Like honey, you can place an oil bottle or other glassy pot containing oil items by the side of the main food item. Use the light from different angles or perspectives, and capture celestial food photos.

Use lemon slices

Lemon slices for food photography

Are you going to capture photos of juice items? Fantastic! The inclusion of lemon pieces will increase the feeling of taste and chill. Different colors of lemon (raw lemon and mature lemon) will add variety to your photos. Such a drink item demands a bath tab, beach, or swimming pool as its backdrop. If possible, create any beautiful settings for high-end food photography.

Water steam or vapors

Capturing an image of such a food product that needs to have steam or vapors upwards, you can add it. It will show the product is hot and just taken away from the chef to serve. For tea, coffee, or soup, warm smoke is necessary.

Water steam or vapors

Then what you should do? To keep the food edible, cook, and take hot water behind the food. Take images in a way so that it looks the vapor is going upwards from the food. To make the vapor thinner, use a funnel oppositely, and keep coffee or tea in front of it.

Green Items

Green leaves and vegetables can include extra attraction to any foods. While decorating hero dishes, try to keep green items. It also increases food values. Green items improve the color variations of an image.

To increase greenish in your favorite food items, try some eatable leaves, vegetables, and fruits. For example, include lettuce, coriander leaf, cabbage, garlic or onion leaves, green fruits like avocado, guava, green apple, and more. Green or red tomato can be a complimentary item with food.

You need not mix the green vegetables always with the cooked food, rather just place by the side while serving the food. Take a big plate, keep your main food item in the middle, and place the green leaves beside the meal. It helps in improving food photo aesthetics.

Dropping or pouring items

On presentation of food photographs, you can apply sugar tricks. Dropping sugar creates a dropping dew feel. This trick works best for ice-cream photos, strawberry photos, etc. Capturing tea or coffee photos, pouring sugar from the top gives you a fresh feel.

Another tip for presenting liquid items is to pour lemon or orange juice on the glass. Spray water on the outside of the glass so that it looks like sweating. You can add dropping ice-cube with drinks items.

For drinks item presentation, keep some fruits on the plate with the glass. It will show the identity of the juice or fruit drink items.

Egg albumen

Egg white or egg albumen can play a crucial role in decorating food items. It is itself a testy food item. Egg albumen with yolk on the center gives an extra delicious look. Such an image of the fried or semi-fried egg can fit with any food items.

Boiled eggs can be a part of your food garnishing. Use a full egg or cut it to show the yellow yolk inside. In your photos, cutting half an egg will include color variety. These types of images are favorite to the egg lovers.

Imagine egg poached on a plate with spoons! Add some green vegetables, grilled tomato, asparagus, and salt!! Doesn’t the scenario bring water in the mouth?

Egg albumen can also be used to make food like burger glittering. Break an egg, separate the yolk, and brush the albumen on the outside of burger and

Decoration with vegetables

Vegetables should be one of the prior items for the food decoration before photography. Various colorful vegetables can be used for having multi-color food images. If we mention, tomato, asparagus, cucumber, and the like vegetables come on the top of the list. These items will not only make the food look tasty but also they will add beauty to the food photos. You can add extra vegetables like broccoli, beans, capsicum, and more.

Garnishing for food photos

Food garnishing for serving or photography is an art. It provides a feel about the excellence of the chef, restaurant, and even the photographer. So, garnishing food is crucial for producing stunning food photos.

Now the question is how to garnish food for shooting photos? If you Google it, you will get a lot of ideas for food serving and decoration. Let’s have a look at some food garnishing plans-

Take a white plate. Slice cucumber. Keep the slice one by one around the plate. Get some red cherry, strawberry slice, carrot, and some other fruits and vegetables. You can add prawn, onion, and a cup of soup. Try to create imagery.

Garnishing food with fruits and vegetables, you have to be an artist sometimes. Create animal with apple, carrot, watermelon, onion, etc. Make flowers with tomato, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, etc. Before decorating any food for photography, think, and create a plan on what you want to do.

Using various vegetables, creams, fruits, eggs, fishes, etc., you can create an urban setting or country setting on the plate. Use edible shrubs, meats, chicken, strawberry, and many other things to

Ikebana for food photos

Ikebana is the art of flower arrangement widely celebrated in Japan. The art is used for formal display and it has some strict rules. Ikebana is popular for formal events. However, this Ikebana style can be followed for food decoration before capturing images.

One of the must-obeyed rules of Ikebana is that the flower must look alive in the flower vessel. In the same way, you can garnish your foods so that they look fresh and alive. With your hero dishes, add some flowers or make flowers utilizing fruits and vegetables.

Some nasty food beautifying stuff

Though we swear at the top of the content not to mention any nasty food garnishing way, but to make you known to aware, we are going to create a list of what the advertisers use for making their food attractive. We don’t recommend using the nasty stuff. Let’s have the list-

Shaving cream on the cake items instead of edible cream
Artificial steam creation with tampons & fire keeping just behind the food items
Cardboard between pancakes and engine oil instead of syrup
Use Toothpicks to hold elements on the right position
Glue instead of milk and food ingredients on it. Glue prevents sinking and soggy.
Dishwashing liquid soap creates longer-lasting bubbling foam on the glass full of wine

However, food product advertisers and marketers use hundreds of nasty tricks for making their images prominent. They adopt the steps to achieve great food images for catching potential customers. Taking image editing from an image manipulation service provider can work best for the already captured photos.

Photography is an art. If you are a passionate photographer, perhaps you do everything to produce outstanding images. You also keep no stone unturned for gaining the best food photos. So, to make your preparation for food photography easier, we tried to collect here some steps. If it works for your food garnishing, thumbs up.