7 Key Photo Retouching Services for Food Photographers

The food blogger or restaurant owner likes to show appetizing food photos. Photography doesn’t capture the true essence of subject always. Despite your best effort, the photographs might turn out to be bland and unattractive. Besides, compositing and manipulation always need the support of an expert.

Photo retouching companies offers an eclectic range of services to provide solutions to all common issues surrounding food photography. The following is a short summary of 7 vital food photo retouching services.

1. Color correction

As with any other image, photographers usually face issues with incorrect white balance, color casts from artificial lighting and muted tones during post-production. Color correction is easy to do and takes little time. Time and effort can easily add up when dealing with a large volume of images. You would like to save precious time for more challenging and interesting task. Outsourcing is the way to do so.

Professional retouchers can use advanced color correction tools to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and white balance. Besides, color grading is something that only experienced professionals can do justice. It can help create a cohesive and visually appealing look. Enhance the greens of salads and the golden browns of baked goods with professional color grading.

2. Background adjustment

Backgrounds can be distracting. You need to either remove it completely or edit it appropriately to complement the main subject. While several tools exist to remove background, nothing can match the precision of clipping path. Sometimes, multiple clipping paths are created to retouch different food items and props lying on the table.

Backgrounds are cleaned up, replaced, or blurred to help keep the focus on food items. Props are also adjusted or entirely removed to maintain the aesthetic quality of the image. The objective is to give maximum focus to the food while enhancing its appeal with background and prop adjustment.

3. Clean up

However you try, the food images are likely to contain imperfections like crumbs, smudges, or spills. Dust particles, uneven sauce spreads, and other blemishes and distracting table elements are some of the common issues with food photography.

Retouchers use healing brushes, clone stamps and patch tools to remove imperfections and clean up areas surrounding food. While cleaning and removing unwanted elements, it becomes important to maintain texture and keep details intact. Only professionals with several years of experience can come out with perfect results.

4. Texture Enhancement

It is not just important to maintain texture, but also enhance it further and make the food more appetizing and visually appealing. Images must evoke passion and create an emotional connection. People like not just to see but to feel the crispiness of fried chicken and the creamy smoothness of a chocolate mousse.

Advanced retouching techniques, such as frequency separation, dodge and burn and clarity adjustments are used to preserve and enhance food texture. Retouching professionals can help highlight the crispy, juicy or creamy qualities of the food, making it look as good as it tastes.

5. Shadows and reflections

Not every photography session comes out as perfect as you wish. A little issue with natural or artificial lighting can result into harsh shadows, uneven or splotchy lighting, or a lack of dimension. Deep shadows and flat-looking images are among the common issues with improper lighting setup.

Retouching professionals work with tools like curves, levels and gradient filters to ensure that the lighting in the final image appears natural and balanced. Unwanted shadows are removed and harsh shadows are lightened. Wherever necessary, new shadows and reflections are created to give the dish a more realistic look.

6. Compositing

Two or more images are put together to create one more attractive image. This process is called compositing. Many commercial food images are a result of professional photo compositing services. Some food industries, such as beverage, can’t do without compositing, which helps capture multiple shots in one frame.

7. Manipulation

Sometimes, it becomes necessary to alter shapes and edges due to certain photography issues. These things can get corrected in post-processing only. Correcting uneven edges, straightening lines and shapes of objects, and giving shape to certain food portion are among the common manipulation issues that a professional retoucher can successfully handle.