Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 50mm f/1.4, 1/125 sec at f/4.0, ISO 800 (both images)

This is the view from the window of my condo. I have an entire wall that is almost completely covered with windows (minus a few feet of drywall at the bottom) so it was pretty easy to spot the gorgeous golden clouds as the sun was rising. I had my camera nearby so I grabbed a few photos, then put my camera down and made coffee.

When I peeked outside five minutes later and noticed that all the color in the clouds was gone. It took only five minutes for the gorgeous, beautiful light to be replaced by boring normal-ness. If you’ve ever photographed landscapes or portraits outdoors you already understand that there is literally just a few minutes of this type of gorgeous light in any given day, the kind of light that glows orange and red and is so soft you would stand in it for hours if you could.

And don’t you just love all of the parallels with light & photography … and life? I titled this “cleverly” to mimic the phrase “life is short” because, well, it is. Why not rush outside with your camera when you see something beautiful to hold on to it for as long as you can? Why not get up at 4:00 am to head out to a gorgeous mountain and capture the sun as it rises?

We should do things every day that are filled with meaning, spend time with people we love and do things just because they feel good … because life is short. We should want to hold on to them as long as possible, really live for each moment … and not pass up on opportunities because we were too lazy, tired or scared. We should take more risks, find balance and be adventurous … the great moments in life pass by as quickly as the golden light of the morning sun, so don’t let them pass by without your camera (… or your heart … but they are kinda one in the same if you ask me). :)

Canon 7D, Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens, 1/250 sec (left) and 1/350 (right) at f/2.8, ISO 200

Last night I had dinner with some friends at their house and brought over some salmon and cedar planks I’d been wanting to use. I don’t grill too often (mostly because I don’t own a grill) and really wanted to both eat food cooked on cedar and photograph it, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I brought all the fixins (minus the home-made Teriyaki sauce that Renee cooked up) and they helped out with the grill. I brought my Canon 7D w/ 50 f/1.4 along to get a few photos … I wasn’t expecting to get too much but I really like the images I made. Plus, they’re photographers, too, so they totally understood my need to photograph the food. :)

To make the salmon I soaked the cedar planks in water for about 20-30 mins and then marinated the salmon for about 20 mins in homemade Teriyaki sauce (soy sauce, garlic and ginger cooked for a bit … not sure exactly how she cooked it but it was good!). The grill was pre-heated to about 350-400° F, then we added the cedar planks and let them heat up for a few minutes. When they were ready we flipped the planks over, placed salmon on them (along with some asparagus seasoned w/ olive oil and salt/pepper) and I layered orange slices over the top of the salmon. It all cooked for approximately 20 minutes, then we took it off the grill and ate it up. It was really, really good … the smokiness flavor from the cedar really came through, especially in the asparagus … and I smelled like a campfire the rest of the evening (which is awesome!).

Here is a behind-the-scenes pic of me, along with a photo of the smoking asparagus:

Canon 7D, Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens, 1/100 sec at f/2.8, ISO 200

When I photograph food I do my best to use as much natural light as possible. The images above both have natural, diffused sunlight coming in from the right with a reflector to the left, but there is a slight difference between them.

Can you see it?

In the image on the left there isn’t enough fill-light hitting the subject. The reason for this is that the reflector wasn’t pointing to the part of the image that needed light. It was angled the wrong direction – completely parallel to the window (you can see that the background is a bit lighter in that shot). I needed the light to hit the glass at an angle, so I turned the reflector so it was facing the front-left part of the glass that was in my view. (See the diagram to the right for the final setup – click on it for a larger view.)

It’s important that you not only have your reflector filling in the subject opposite the main light, but also that you make sure it’s angled in a way that it’s pleasing to your photograph. You don’t need anything fancy to use as a reflector – a large piece of foam-core will do the trick. But if you do have a traditional reflector (this is the one I use) then you are also able to bend and warp it to wrap more light around your image.

Yesterday I posted some white-balance tips for shooting food photography. In this post I’m going to go through the steps I took to edit the image. The photo used in this post is from the same shoot and is edited identically to the image in the previous post.

I reduced the images sizes in this post for format purposes … feel free to click on them to view in a larger resolution.

The images I photograph, whether they are for work or for fun, always go through Adobe Lightroom before I edit in Photoshop, and sometimes, if they are not “work” images, I will just export straight out of Lightroom and not even use Photoshop. I’ve been using the program ever since it was released and have found it to be an essential part of my workflow.

So, for this image, I started by editing the RAW file in Lightroom. I made some slight temperature and tonal adjustments (the changes are hi-lighted in yellow). Then I exported the image as a PSD file and opened it in Photoshop CS4 to do further editing.

When I edit images I typically use a lot of layers. This photo didn’t need too much work to it, so it’s not as complicated when it comes to my typical work-flow. I prefer to use adjustment layers to preserve the non-destructiveness as much as possible during the editing process … and so I can go back and fix anything I missed the first time around.

The first layer is a Levels Adjustment Layer – I named it “light” in my layers panel to the left (click here to view the actual RGB adjustments). One thing you’ll note is that, hi-lighted in yellow is the blending modes drop-down and I have it set to “luminosity“. I do this with my images so that I can do masking that will only affect one aspect of the adjusmtents, if necessary. In this particular image I didn’t want the red areas of the salmon and topping to be overly lightened (it was creating some ugly blotching in the darker red areas) so I used “SELECT –> Color Range…” to find the red areas, then I filled in the selection with black in the layer mask.

Next I added another Levels Adjustment Layer, changed the blend-mode to “color” and did some minor color editing. I used the far left slider on the “Red” and “Green” channels and brought them in slightly to the right until the colors looked balanced (click here to view the adjustments).

The third layer is a Black and White Adjustment Layer, the blend mode changed to “Soft Light” (I also will sometime use the “Overlay” blend mode”) and then dropped the opacity down to 20%. This will usually give a nice contrasty look to the image, and often will make the blacks stand out in the image more.

(If you want to learn more, please click here to view a quick two-minute video tutorial on this effect.)

The last thing I do in my images is add a sharpening layer. I prefer to use the “High Pass” filter and use masking to show only the part of the image I want sharpened, in this case the basil leaf furthest to the right. (I explain how to do this effect towards the end of this video tutorial, at about 5 minutes in.)

And that’s my editing process! I always save the un-flattened PSD version of the image, along with a full-res JPEG. Saving the PSD files eats up more space, but I have found it useful when I need to go back and re-edit a file (or do fun tutorials like this one).

Canon 7D, Canon 24-105 ƒ/4L IS lens, 1/50th sec at ƒ/4, ISO 100

One of the most common challenges I have seen many new food photographers struggle with is getting proper white balance (colors) and also exposure (tones/brightness/contrast) in their food images. When we photograph people we usually have a skin tone to gauge what our white balance is, and since our minds naturally know what looks “right” it’s not too difficult to find the right balance. With food it’s different since the colors and tones can be whatever we make them to be, and sometimes it’s hard to get the image back to those bright, vivid colors we remembered photographing.

The image above is the photo straight out-of-the-camera (left) and edited version (right). It was photographed with window-light on the right and a large silver reflector on the left to fill in shadows. My editing on this was very simple: I corrected the white-balance in Adobe Lightroom (from the RAW file), then used a levels adjustment layer for the tones, a separate levels layer for color, and added a reduced-opacity B&W overlay layer to add some contrast (you can learn how to do that last step here).

So, how can you improve the white-balance in your images? Here are five tips to get you started:

1. Photograph in daylight-balanced light. Using the light in the kitchen, which is usually going to be tungsten or flourescent, is not your ideal light for food photography (or photography in general). Use window light or speedlights/strobes to get the correct color-temperature light and you will immediately see results.

2. Make sure your computer monitor is calibrated. There are a lot of relatively inexpensive calibration tools out there. I use a very simple “Spyder Express” – the newest one on the market (the Spyder Express 3) costs around $75. This is ideal if the majority of your work is displayed online or in a computer format.

3. Pre-set the white-balance in your camera. This can be done with a fancy tool like the Expodisc ($100) or with an inexpensive $5-10 gray card (you can also find them at your local camera store).

4. Shoot in RAW format. This will ensure that you can change your white balance in your editing software if you didn’t get it perfect out-of-camera (and 99% of the time you probably won’t).

5. Compare your before/after image. By comparing your original image to the edited version you will have a better idea of what edits are working and what still needs to be done. You can do this pretty easily by toggling your layer visibility in Photoshop … I have a short two-minute video on this topic on my blog here.

This “Before & After” is a simple cross-processed image with a little bit of Photoshop layer styles added to give it a white border. Above is the finished version … here’s the straight-out-of-camera RAW image:

I did some white-balance and tonal adjustments in Adobe Lightroom, and also added a cross-processed effect using the “Split Toning” panel. The adjustments are visible in the image below:

I then brought the photo into Photoshop and added a Black & White adjustment layer with the blend-mode set to “overlay” (I clipped it to the main image so it wouldn’t affect the layer style). The layer style is a stroke using a pattern (one of the white paper patterns), then I added a simple drop shadow to give it some depth.

When I process photos I go through two main image processing software programs: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 & Adobe Photoshop CS4. Lightroom is where I organize the images, pick the ones I want to use and do global RAW adjustments like white-balance and subtle tonal adjustments. After I export the image (as a .psd) I do a LOT of my processing in Photoshop. I thought it would be fun to show some before/after of my images along with a brief description of each of the steps I took to get to the final product.

So, to begin, here is the straight-out-of-camera RAW file I started with:

As you can see, the white balance is way off and it’s slightly underexposed. I also wanted to do some cropping to push the focus onto the baby. Here’s what I ended up with after doing some adjustments in Lightroom:

To get to the final image I used several layers in Photoshop. (The image at the top of this post shows each step, or you can click here to see the image on Flickr with notes added to describe each layer.) Here are the steps I took in Photoshop to process this image, starting with the bottom (background) layer moving upwards:

1) I started with a DUPLICATE layer of the background to clone out the logo on the pants (necessary for stock images).
2) Next is a BLANK layer to do some additional non-destructive cloning.
3) There are two LEVELS adjustment layers. The first one is for RGB tonal adjustmens (brightness/contrast), and I did some masking of the shirt area so it wasn’t too bright in the final image.
4) The second LEVELS adjustment layer is to tweak the color balance in the image.
5) After that was a BLACK & WHITE adjustment layer that I blended using the SOFT LIGHT blending-mode to add some drama to the image. I masked out some of the areas of the flower to balance out the look of the image.
6) For the top and final layer I merged of all the layers below it while still keeping them intact (Mac keyboard shortcut: CMD+OPT+SHIFT+E) and added a HIGH-PASS filter to give it some sharpening. I then changed the blend-mode to OVERLAY and used the mask to selectively sharpen certain areas of the image.

Here is the fully-processed photo:

Camera: Nikon D200; Lens: Sigma 70-200 f/2.8; Exposure: ISO 100, 1/320 @ f/2.8