This is where the magic happens and a great photo is turned into a polished image. You want to push the colors, textures and atmosphere up a notch but still keep the “realness” that food photography is all about. You don’t want to get fake, you want to get authentic and exaggerate. The beauty of working from a RAW file is that you can push the exposure, white balance and dynamic range to your liking without introducing any digital noise. These “baseline” edits will set up the image for any advanced edits you want to do later but the image should always still look like a real food photo!
One of the most important parts of color grading for food is finding a balance between real and appealing tones. This is where you can use your white balance to add warmth to a cooler daylight image, bringing the golden warmth out in your croissants or adding extra depth to your juicy tomatoes (without taking them too far). With the color wheel, you can bump up your green herbs, but not your skin tones and neutrals. We don’t want to oversaturate an image and make our food look fake.
A bit of contrast and exposure tweaking will give your image some extra pop and make your texture more defined. Think of it like the difference between seeing an object in 3D and looking at a photo of it. For food, adding some extra micro-contrast will help bring out the crunch of a bread roll, the veins in a leaf, or the bubbles in a piece of chocolate, but not to the point of the image looking super sharp and exaggerated. You can also bring the global contrast up a notch to create some extra contrast between highlights and shadows. This is especially useful for layered images such as salads or burgers. You can also use the curves tool (or levels tool) to create contrast, but this way you have the option to leave some detail in the shadows and keep the highlights from blowing out. This will give your image a bit of a 3D feel that makes the viewer’s eye dance around the surface of your dish, and adds a bit of tactility to your image.
With dodge and burn you can draw attention and shape light in your image. Lighten up the foam of a cappuccino or the lightest part of a glaze to emphasize the interesting parts of your image. Darken the edges to create a vignette effect and guide the viewer’s attention to the center of your image. This works very similar to a natural light falloff. If you don’t use it in an over the top way, this helps to create drama and tension. If you use a brush at low opacity to dodge and burn, nobody will notice your adjustments. It’s pure magic. You can use this tool to create images with strong emotional connections. It’s what separates a good, technically correct image from an image that speaks to the viewer.
The final steps include sharpening and noise reduction, which helps keep the image sharp when viewed at various sizes while also keeping it clean and film-like. Edge and texture sharpening helps enhance lines and textures (such as the edge of a plate or strawberry seeds) without creating halos or over-sharpening, while carefully applying noise reduction will help if you have to shoot at higher ISOs (such as with some food photography in lower light) and want to avoid a sterile look. Resizing (if necessary for web or print) and exporting the photograph with compression (if needed) is the last step. By following these steps, the photographer should have a beautiful, clean, edited photo ready to be used.
