The art of editing food; editing small flaws

Before and after

Let me begin by saying that I am absolutely no expert when it comes to editing things in photoshop, but I can do the basics. In general I believe in the idea to make sure you shoot the food right in the first place thus limiting the amount of time spend behind the computer. Let’s face it; I would rather be shooting a fabulous dish then spending hours trying to fix something I should have fixed while shooting.
But everyone who shoots in raw format, knows that you have to do a few basics things to make the photo looks it’s best. For those not familiair with raw vs jpeg; let me just say that shooting in jpeg means that your camera has developed the photo for you, with raw you are the one who still needs to do that. I always call it a digital negative which is really what it is anyway. When we all were still using film, it was the store that did the developing for us. The same thing you still need to do when shooting in raw.
To give you an example on how you can drastically improve on an image I have chosen this tiny filled cherry tomato, that we did for christmas (recipe is somewhere down below in a previous post)
Now if you look at the original raw file below you can say already there is a major difference in color and overal appearance to the finished photo above.


I’ve placed them next to eachother so you can see the difference better. The initial photo looks dark and uninviting while a simple adjustment to the exposure, vibrance, white balance and blacks in the photo make it look much more appetizing and something you want to eat, rather then toss in the bin.

Now the most important change I had to make to this particular photo is the skin of the tomato. Because they were actually eaten the tomatoes have been hollowed first and then filled with the shrimp cocktail. Had I know what would happen and had they only been for the photo I had simply removed the top of the tomato and put some shrimp salad on top.
What happens if you take the inside of a tomato out, is that it looses it’s firmness and immediately start to wrinkle! And that just looks very unappetizing. I am not sure if there is another way to prevent it from happening, but to be honest; if you serve these as snacks, there is no one that is going to notice that the skin is wrinkled. People don’t tend to meticulously scrutinize their food before putting it in their mouths..:)

I’ve put a closeup here of the before and after of the skin and because the original version is darker the wrinkles are a little less noticeable but you can still see the clearly. And the skin of the finished version is quite smooth and nicely glowing. Taking these out with the clone tool will not work as it will also change the roundness of the tomato as I found out after giving that a try. But again I am no photoshop master so I am sure there is someone who can do it much better then me.
The tool I used to carefully remove the wrinkles was the healing brush. Not the spot healing brush, because you want to make sure that you select the areas where the origin is taken from, otherwise you’ll end up with a very weird looking tomato.
But as you can see here in the before and after is that the original shadows are still there, so the tomato shape has not changed which is how you want it. It still needs to look like a real tomato and not like  a round tennisball.
So with about 5 minutes worth of work, you have greatly improved on your photo! But remember; there has to be a good photo to begin with. Photoshop has never been able to improve on a bad photo!

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Tagged as: editing, foodphotography, improving, photoshop, removing flaws, tutorial