Improve Your Food Photography with Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom is one of the most useful and easy to use tools to improve the look of your photos. Post production being a crucial step in the creation of an image, it is even more so in food photography. It is indeed essential to clean and optimize the look of the food you are photographing in order to create appetizing images. I invite you to discover below the steps of post-production of a culinary photo as well as the main tools I use in the software. We will finish with a simple editing in Adobe Photoshop.

Getting the right colour balance is a crucial element for a successful photo. My secret is to take a photo with a colour chart such as the ColorChecker over my setup. 

Once in Lightroom we use this photo to select the white of the colour palette using the dropper (or by clicking W) located on the left of the temperature balance menu. The software will automatically adjust the white balance by relying on the white of the “ColorChecker.”  This tool does not give the absolute truth, but in general it provides a good indication of the figures to use in the “Temperature” and “Hue” tabs. It is then up to you to decide if you change the values slightly. For my part I like to cool the image a little in relation to the number the “ColorChecker” tells me. This is not the case for all types of photos, because especially in portraits I prefer to warm up the image.

I also like to use the “Adobe Colour” profile to have a more contrasting and colourful image. In general, this is a profile that works well in food photography, as it allows you to enhance the colours of food.

Mathieu Dupuis

 Canon EOS 5D Mark II + EF 17-40mm à 40mm
1/8 | f/5 | ISO 500

Once the colour balance is adjusted to my liking, I adjust the “Tone” menu. I decrease the contrast and highlights and increase the brightness of the shadows. 

I like to give a little magic to my photos by decreasing the brightness by about -10 and the haze by -1. Finally, I increase the saturation by +5 to accentuate the colourful look of the image.

In some images it can be interesting to play with the tone curve in order to adjust more precisely all the types of lights in the image (highlights, highlights, blacks and shadows). In this particular image I chose to increase the highlights to accentuate the reflections on the scene a little more.

Mathieu Dupuis
Canon EOS 5D Mark III + EF 24-70mm F/2.8 USM à 70mm
1/8 | f/8 | ISO 160

The colour menu is where I think you can really transform an image. In the case of this setup, what was very important to me was to highlight the complementary colours turquoise and orange. So I chose to modify the greens, turquoise and blues to be more saturated while decreasing the brightness of the blues and turquoise to highlight the background colour. For the oranges, I adjusted the hue that suited me and did the opposite in terms of its brightness by increasing it slightly so that the apricots and flowers catch the eye.

Mathieu Dupuis
Canon EOS 5D Mark III + EF 70-200mm F4 IS USM à 127mm
1/800 | f/5.6 | ISO 500

Although today's cameras allow very sharp photographs and high-resolution images to be taken, I still like to increase the sharpness of the edges slightly. This is especially useful for commercial projects that will be used for large format printing.

Mathieu Dupuis
Canon EOS R + RF 24-70mm f2.8L USM à 63mm
1/125 | f/4 | ISO 100

We now return to the top of the menu where we find the tools to work directly on the image. This is the moment to scrutinize your photo by zooming in to eliminate imperfections. This is a very important step in culinary photography since by removing the imperfections on the food and the scene, we ensure to have an appetizing result.

Using the “mask” tool, I create circles on the plates to increase the exposure and brightness of the shadows. This is a particularly useful technique in food photography since the content of the plates is often underexposed compared to the rest of the image. The contents of the plate are the main subject, so it is important to give them the spotlight.

Finally, since the right side of the image corresponds to the side of the window, it is naturally overexposed compared to the rest of the image. This can easily be adjusted by adding a mask on the right side of the image, reducing the exposure and the highlights.

Mathieu Dupuis
Canon EOS RP + RF 50mm f1.8 STM
1/125 | f/1.8 | ISO 1250

Mathieu Dupuis
Canon EOS RP + RF 50mm f1.8 STM
1/125 | f/1.8 | ISO 1250

For this specific scene, I chose to take several handheld pictures and then edit them in Adobe Photoshop. To do this, I “copy” the parameters of the already retouched photo and “paste” them on the other images I want to integrate in the montage.

To make the final montage, simply import the images into Photoshop and drag one image onto the other to create two separate layers. Then use the “erase” tool to make part of the top layer disappear. Once the image is flattened, you can export it in JPEG format and that's it !

To wrap it up, the main elements to modify in food photography are: 

-The colour balance

-The play of tones and contrasts

-The colours

-The cleaning of imperfections and the elimination of reflections or objects that disturb the eye

-The sharpness of the image 

There is no recipe that applies to all conditions, and it will always be necessary to adapt our editing to the different images and environments that we photograph. On the other hand, I have some habits and settings that I apply to all my work to have a certain homogeneity of style, but I always like to leave a little room for spontaneity!