Great Escape Publishing

Posted March 22nd, 2018 by Deborah Kolb & filed under Travel Photography.

I love taking pictures of my food and then adding them to my stock portfolio. Food images sell, and the ones I take pay for the dish that I photographed… and sometimes much more.

For instance, this tower of tuna tartar has sold enough to pay for the entire meal that my son and I enjoyed at an awesome restaurant in Hawaii a few years back. I used Lightroom to process it, bringing out the highlights and a little vibrancy. Gently using clarity for definition also helped.

Without the Lightroom adjustments, this image may not have been accepted by the stock site, let alone have sold so well.

And, as always, I shot this image using the portrait format as well. Although both sell, the landscape-oriented image has performed better.

I shoot in RAW, so my pictures are a little flat out of the camera. Shooting in RAW is great, since it captures more data in the image that you can work with. Lightroom, my editing software of choice, is great since it doesn’t destroy your images and is quick and easy to work with.

I just got back from another trip to Hawaii, and once again, I had fun photographing my food. Here are some before-and-afters.

Here’s a yummy Acai Bowl topped with delicious fruit:

I did a few things in Lightroom pretty quickly with this image. First, I straightened the horizon.

Next, I removed the distracting dark spots on the table with the spot removal tool. In your pictures, it is best to remove anything that is not useful and that pulls the eye away from your subject.

Then I applied one of my customized presets to bring out the color and texture. I use a variety of sliders for my presets. In this image, my preset adjusted the contrast, highlights, vibrancy, blacks, whites, clarity, and shadows.

Lastly, when exporting the JPEG file, I added a little sharpening in the export instructions.

Lightroom is an awesome tool for making your photos extra-marketable on stock sites. Everyone loves mouth-watering images of food, and the app’s tools can help make your images look extra drool-worthy.

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