Hi there, it's Nisha. Today I'm going to show you how to edit food photos for
Instagram. I'll share my top ten tips for food photography editing, including all
of the techniques I use every time I post a food photo to Instagram. If you're
looking for more food photography resources I have another video on my
youtube channel where I take you behind the scenes on how to style and edit a
particular scene. I also have a series on my blog for beginner food photographers.
and on my Instagram page @rainbowplantlife, I share lots of food
photography tips and tutorials, so you can find the links to all of those
resources in the description box below. I've got a lot of requests to do a video
on how to edit food photos so I hope you enjoy this one. And I'm also working on a
video specific to Lightroom on how to edit food photos there, so stay tuned for that.
My first tip to improving your food photos for Instagram is to get off
Instagram. I know that sounds a little confusing but when you have a photo
you're ready to edit, your first instinct might be to just open the Instagram app
and start using the different filters and tools there. While instagram filters
might look good for your selfies or your travel photos or your fashion photos,
unfortunately they generally make food look pretty unnatural most of the time.
And that's because food photography is a really specific type of photography. It's
not like travel photography or lifestyle or landscape. It's really dependent on
light and white balance and color in a unique way, so when you're editing
you want to keep that in mind. And Instagram filters just don't cut it when
it comes to food photography. So if you're not editing food photos in
Instagram, where should you be editing them? And that is my second tip.
Lightroom is a photo editing software from Adobe, and I think it's the best and
most powerful way to edit food photos. and the reason I said invest in
Lightroom is because it's not exactly cheap. It's about $150
for Lightroom, so I know that's not affordable for everyone or maybe
it's not in your budget right now, so I will mention a few alternatives in a
minute. I do recommend it as an investment
because it's an investment in your work, whether you're professional or an
amateur. it can really transform the quality of your photos and that's why
I'll be putting together a how to edit food photos and Lightroom series, so stay
tuned for that. Some photographers use Photoshop for editing instead of
Lightroom but I find Lightroom a lot easier and more intuitive to use, and I
feel like it has everything there. The only reason I would use Photoshop is if
I wanted to make some sort of transformative Photoshop effect, like
combining photos or something like that, which I don't do, so Lightroom is
definitely sufficient for most food photographers. And the two alternatives I
wanted to mention are Google Snapseed and VSCO Cam. They're both mobile apps
and they're both free, and they both can really make your food photos look better
even if they don't have all the capabilities of Lightroom. I like to
start editing in Snapseed by making adjustments to contrast and clarity and
color and vibrance and all that kind of stuff, and then VSCO Cam is better if you
want to kind of use filters and evoke a particular mood. I will say that most of
the filters in VSCO Cam are not good for food photos, but there are a couple
that are really good. my favorites for food photos are in the A family and E
family of presets.
Now let's talk about some basics. before you can learn how to edit food
photography, you have to know some basics of photo editing. The tools you'll
probably use the most in food photography editing are exposure,
contrast, highlights and shadows, saturation and vibrance, clarity,
sharpness and white balance. First, exposure. Exposure is actually critical
to photography as a whole, not just editing, so if you want to brush up on
what exposure is and how it works, you can find a description in my food
photography tips for the beginner series, which is linked below.
Unfortunately some apps treat brightness and exposure as the same concept but
they are not. When you increase or decrease exposure, for instance, you're
going to affect the entire image in a more balanced way than if you were to
increase or decrease just brightness, so that's why I always recommend to
increase or decrease exposure and not brightness. So if you have a brightness
tool, don't use it. I would use the exposure tool. Editing the shadows and highlights
in your food photos can really transform them, in a good way or in a bad
way. Shadows are the darkest part of the photo that have less detail there and
highlights are the brightest part of the photo that also have less detail there.
When you shoot in RAW format, which I'll talk about in the next tip, you're able
to recover a lot of the lost details in those really dark shadows and in those
bright highlights, so that's why I recommend shooting in RAW and I'll talk
about that in a minute. You'll want to edit your shadows and highlights and
increase them or decrease them depending on the mood and the look you're going
for in your photo. So if you're looking for a dark and moody look, which is
really popular in food photography right now, you're probably going to want to
decrease your shadows and kind of embrace those dark shadows, but if you're
looking for something bright and airy and summery,
you might want to increase your highlights and not decrease your shadows.
Now for contrast. I don't want to get too technical in this video with definitions,
so the one thing I'll say is usually food photos can benefit from a slight
increase in contrast. And I say slight increase because you don't want
something super high contrast because it's going to look unnatural. Now let's talk
about vibrance and saturation. Like exposure and brightness, vibrance and
saturation are similar concepts but not the same. So I always recommend
increasing vibrance a little bit to make your photo pop more with more color, but
I don't recommend increasing saturation most of the time.
Because when you increase saturation it's gonna give it a more intense look
and when you increase vibrance, in contrast, it will increase the intensity
of the colors but in a more balanced and natural way. White balance is super
important for food photography. It's also referred to as temperature, and it
basically means how cool or warm a photo is, with cool photos looking more blue
and warm photos looking more orange. Your white balance will be affected while
you're taking your photo and it'll be determined by the source of light, the
type of light, the direction of light, time of day, and so if you don't get it
perfectly during your first time when you're taking the photo, you always have
an opportunity to change it in editing. Like I mentioned before, food photography
is very specific and sensitive, so if you change your white balance a lot, it can make
your food look a lot different. It can make it look unappetizing or it can make it
look really nice. Finally, sharpness and clearing. These
concepts are similar but not the same. Increasing clarity will give your photo
darker edges, more detail and more texture. I would increase clarity very
slowly, if at all, because too much clarity can give your photo a really
hard, defined sharp look, which is usually not desired in food photography. You
usually want something soft and light and kind of natural, so be careful with
that tool. And sharpness is basically, sort of, how sharp a photo is. But don't
think that you should just automatically increase it to the maximum value because
that can create a lot of unnecessary and unwanted noise, which is kind of like
fuzziness and grain in your photo. So there's really a happy medium there, so
don't take it too far.
Now for something a little more technical. My fourth tip is to shoot in
RAW format. A RAW file is the complete data from the camera. Itt hasn't been
processed, it hasn't been compressed like a JPEG.
And that means it has a higher quality and that also means you have more
freedom and flexibility to edit it. You can edit the values as much as you want
or as little as you want in a way that you can't do as much with a JPEG. So
that's why I always recommend shooting in RAW format. You're gonna get higher
quality photos and you're going to be able to edit them more. Just FYI you can't
upload a raw file to Instagram. You first have to process it and edit it in a
software like Lightroom or maybe a software on your computer, and then
export it as a JPEG. Also RAW files are a lot bigger than JPEG, so they're going
take up a lot more storage space. SoI don't recommend just storing them on
your laptop because you'll run out of space pretty quickly. I use an external
storage drive that keeps all of my photos on there so I will put that in
the description box below in case you want to check it out.
Food photography is a very intimate type of photography because everyone can relate to food.
You might post a photo of pasta and someone 10,000 miles away might see your photo
on Instagram. They might not speak the same language, they might not know what
the dish is, but they can still relate to the food if it looks good, if it looks
comforting, and if it looks like food. And that's why you want your food to look
natural - so people can relate to it people can identify with it, and people
can even see themselves eating it. what you don't want to do is edit your food
photos so much that they look unnatural or not real or sort of unidentifiable.
You want people to know what it is that you're cooking and presenting. Here are
some tips to steer you away from unnatural food photography editing.
Do not oversaturate your colors. Again, I'm all about bright colors. My name is
rainbowplantlife, my page is very bright and colorful, but I think there's a
natural way to enhance your colors and I think there's an unnatural way.
Increasing the saturation too much on a food photo can make it look gaudy, harsh
unattractive, ugly, you name it. So just just don't do it.
Similarly, don't alter the hues or the colors too much. If you're posting a
photo of an orange, let it look like the color orange. That's its name, after all.
Don't try to make it look red or pink. Wnd while it's okay to make
small adjustments here and there-- sometimes it can really help--you want to
be very methodical about it and very cautious about it. While HD editing can
look really cool with maybe a landscape or architecture, it is not designed for
food photography. It's gonna make it look unnatural and like four dimensional. And
similarly be cautious when you're increasing clarity. That can make your
photo look really dark and unnatural, especially if you have a bright, sort of
white looking photo with an airy look, you really don't want to be increasing
clarity there. It tends to look better if you increase it a little bit in a dark kind of photo.
If you use any of the techniques I talked about today, leave me
a comment below and give this video a thumbs up. And find me on Instagram at
@rainbowplantlife if you have any more questions about editing. And if you
haven't subscribed already, please go ahead and hit that red subscribe button
because very shortly I'll be releasing a Lightroom food photo editing tutorial
and I know you'll want to see that, so stay tuned, and I'll see you in the next
video. Bye!