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How to style and edit food photography

There’s a lot that goes into crafting a mouthwatering photo of a delicious dish or decadent desert. Michaela Hartwig takes us behind-the-scenes with key tips on prepping food shoots, what to do on set, and how to achieve natural-looking images with the right tones using Capture One’s photo editing software.

MICHAELA’S TIPS

Preparation

Prep all the ingredients that you plan to use for your shoot. Sort the most beautiful herbs, fruit or vegetables. Place everything on a table nearby in separate bowls and plates so everything is ready when you need it. Provide a chopping board and a sharp knife, a scissor, some Q-Tips, tissues and a bowl with fresh water in case you need to clean something. When you’re shooting, you don’t want to waste time searching for a specific ingredient or tool. This prep will save a lot of time.

Prepare your setting. Use a placeholder to make some test shots before you start with the food. Be aware of what kind of lighting you want. Place blackboards wherever you want to create shadows. Place whiteboards wherever you want to brighten up the image. Of course, you can add some shadows in Capture One Pro afterwards, but it’s always better to shoot the image as close to the desired result as possible.

Don’t ever wash your salad or your herbs. If you want to have fresh-looking produce, use unwashed salad or herbs and just spray it with a bit of water just seconds before you press the shutter release.

Buy more ingredients than you need for the actual recipe. You will always need extra herbs, chocolate, flowers, etc to decorate around the plate and make the picture look more interesting and appealing.

When on set:

Shooting tethered using Capture One Pro’s industry-leading tethering and keeping an eye on the Live View Screen helps immensely to get the styling on point when you’re working alone.

Style on Eye Level. If you are shooting a top down, style from above. If you’re shooting angled, style from the angle your camera is shooting from. This could hurt your back sometimes, but the end result will be better when you style from the camera’s perspective.

When you fill glasses or decorate creams on a plate, always use a piping bag or clean spoons for neat and clean arrangements with no spillage.

If possible and if you’re shooting with a tripod: try to show human interaction. This will always give a more vivid look to the image in comparison to a classic plate shot. Try to freeze actions like powdered sugar sprinkling on a cake or chocolate drizzling over the edge of a brownie.

Create foreground. Use some of the props, flowers, herbs, etc to create a foreground. It could be something as simple as a glass of wine just touching the edge of the image in the lower corner. Or perhaps a chair or a leaf close to the lens to create blur.

Editing and Color grading in Capture One Pro:

Color Grading is a difficult but exciting aspect of food photography and I rely on Capture One Pro’s RAW editor to achieve my desired look. The challenge is to create interesting color grading without changing the color of the food so it looks unnatural or unappealing. The intention of food photography is usually to make the viewer hungry. Therefore, the food has to look appealing and natural, not artificial. To achieve this, I like to give my shadows a cool tint and my highlights a warm toning using Capture One Pro’s advanced color tools. I also like to give the greens a blue toning.

Capture One Pro’s image editing software is a lifesaver when it comes to achieving these tones, because I can do any color grading I want on the backdrop, which will affect the plate or perhaps props like cutlery or flowers. But If the color grading affects the actual food too much, I can always erase parts of the mask, so the food itself preserves its natural color.

My pictures most commonly live in cool and blueish shadows, so in most cases it’s necessary to draw in warm tones on a separate layer to the food to make the overall photo more pleasing. However, this is subjective and varies from photo to photo.

I hope this helps you create delicious-looking photos. Good luck!

5 Advantages of Capture One Pro over Lightroom

NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One. To learn more about our latest version, click here.

Food photographer and stylist Michaela Hartwig uses Capture One Pro to create sumptuous and mouth-watering photos. From color grading to the Layer tool, here are the five key advantages that sold her on Capture One’s photo editor:

The power of Layers

When I first started working with Capture One Pro, I quickly realized that it offers me the incredible lucidity in the library as I know it from Lightroom, combined with the power of Photoshop when it comes to layers.

You might be wondering – why are layers important? Can’t I just use the brush tool for local adjustments like I do in Lightroom? That’s certainly a workflow practiced by a lot of photographers and it works for them. But have you ever created several adjustments in Lightroom and then had difficulties finding the right one when you wanted to change it? This has never been easier than when applying those adjustments in Capture One Pro across separate layers.

Just to name a few advantages: You have a very clear overview over all the adjustments applied on the image. You can create radial masks and linear masks. You can fill masks over the whole layer but you can also erase parts of the mask. You can create masks by luminosity –> you can apply adjustments to just the shadows or just the highlights of an image.

And to me the most important advantage: You can change the opacity of masks. Imagine this: You created a tone curve with a matte film effect and some blues and greens in the shadows, it took you quite a long time to find the right balance of colors. But when you’re done with editing you realize that the adjustments are too strong. Instead of now destroying your fine-tuned color tone curve, just turn town the opacity. This way you can still keep the desired color effect of the tone curve but with less of an effect.

Maximum control over color grading

The color tools in Capture One Pro are incredibly versatile, powerful and there are many different ways to achieve your color goals. This was intimidating for me the first time I worked with Capture One Pro. But once you understand both the single tools and how they work together, you will love color grading with Capture One. You can use the levels tool or the tone curve, the color editor, the advanced color editor, the skin tone tool, the color balance. There are no rules and no borders. I particularly enjoy using the tone curve and the color balance tool to give my shadows, my mid tones and my highlights the specific color grading which my pictures are known for. The color balance tool in particular can have a huge effect on contrasts and colors in a very comprehensive way.

I also want to emphasize a specific color tool which you won’t find in Lightroom. It allows for modifications which would otherwise require tons of layers and a lot of effort in Photoshop: the Skin Tone Tool. I am not a beauty photographer or retoucher, but this tool is still incredibly helpful for food photography as well.

I want to show you how critical it is via the below picture. In this picture, I have several different tones of green. Some parts have a saturated, rich green and other parts have some yellow tones. With the skin color tool it’s possible to equalize those colors. I pick the color of my choice and by using the sliders in the red square I can adjust all colors in the marked color wheel to my desired color point in terms of hue, saturation and brightness. When I have several colors in my shadows, this can also have an uncomfortable effect on an image, so I use the skin tool for correcting. It’s incredibly helpful.

Greens before

Greens after

Sessions over catalog-based workflows

Catalog-based workflows – equivalent to catalogs in Lightroom, is possible in Capture One Pro. But when working on current projects, I always prepare my work with Sessions. Here are the top 3 benefits from working with Sessions:

It’s easily accessible. You don’t have to search within a catalog for a specific project or shot. Just go into your PC structure folder, double click on the desired session and Capture One will open your files within that session automatically.

Capture One Pro creates an automatic folder structure within the session. It creates four default folders once you start a new session: Capture, Selects, Output, Trash. The Capture Folder contains all the images that were shot tethered or imported from your SD card. Once you make a selection of your favorite images in Capture One Pro, they will automatically be moved to the Selects Folder. If you want to delete specific images, these will be moved to the Trash folder by default, but they are not gone. You can easily move them back. And the Output Folder is the folder where your exported variants will be sent unless you choose a different folder.

Similarly to Lightroom’s Collections, you can create Session Albums and move your desired images from several folders on your hard drive to a favorite session folder, without physically moving them. This is especially helpful when you want to build up your portfolio.

Working with Styles / in combination with Layers

I’ve never been a fan of Presets in Lightroom, because most of the time all the adjustments of a specific preset just did not match my image. That’s where Styles in Capture One become important. If you’re working on the background layer, it’s possible to combine several Styles just by clicking on them.

However, this is what I would recommend: Apply your styles as new layers if you want to combine with another layer.

For example, you can apply a Style as a layer with one specific adjustment, i.e. a specific tone curve you’ve created before and then combine it with another layer containing other adjustments.

This method helps you develop your specific retouch style, but it’s still highly subjective depending on different images. As mentioned before, you can adjust the opacity of those layers so that you can make the Style match to your image without changing the Style itself.

Tethering

When I first started to use Lightroom for tethering, I couldn’t be more frustrated. It was so incredibly slow, so I preferred to use live view on my phone. However, identifying mistakes on such a small screen and getting the sharpness right was difficult, or even impossible, to achieve. This was the first feature from Capture One Pro to become critical to my workflow: Tethering.

I don’t normally use it when shooting private scenes where layout and details are not that important. But I use it every time I do a product or recipe shot for a client to make sure I get sharpness and composition on point. Capture One Pro’s photo editing software provides fast and easy tethering with a lot of options.

Migrating from Lightroom to Capture One: Practice practice practice!

Export a high res file from Lightroom into your desired Capture One Pro Session and try to recreate the look.

The sliders in Capture One Pro work differently from the ones in Lightroom – you have to get used to them. For example, when using the HSL tool in Lightroom, you will need to use the color editor in Capture One Pro to achieve similar results. But I personally think that the brightness option doesn’t bring you the same result as the luminance slider in Lightroom. therefore, the options for selecting and changing colors and re-editing them in the Advanced Color Editor Tab of Capture One Pro gives you many more possibilities to modify your colors than Lightroom could ever do.

Also, in Capture One Pro you don’t have that section of blacks/darks/lights/whites which can save your shadows and highlights in lightroom. I work with the HDR tool & brightness tool at the same time to achieve similar effects.

When it comes to the clarity, you will find the biggest difference to Lightroom. Capture One Pro offers you 4 varieties of clarity. The one I use is called “natural” and that is exactly what it’s called. It gives you a subtle contrast of the mid tones, in combination with structure you get a crisp and sharpened result without the artificial look of the clarity tool in Lightroom. Almost every food photographer relies on the clarity slider in Lightroom, resulting in a very specific look.

You won’t have that exact same clarity effect in Capture One Pro. It is different, but in my view, it’s better.

Give it a go and edit some of your favorite images in Capture One Pro. You will need to go through a few images until you like the result of the edit. It’s very important that you don’t give up too early! The Capture One Blog and webinars found on Youtube are really helpful when starting out. In particular, the resources which focus on color grading tools like the Advanced Color Editor, the Skin Tone Tool and the Color Balance are highly valuable. You will be surprised by the possibilities!

If you don’t already have Capture One, you can download a 30-day trial and try it out.

sprinking sugar onto brownies michaela hartwig edited capture one pro raw image editor

Recreating Lightroom color grading in Capture One Pro

NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One. To learn more about our latest version, click here.

Introduction

I’ve always loved creating conceptual portraits and I am partial to shooting them in actual locations. Although the process is quite demanding resource-wise and largely dependent on weather, it is a uniquely satisfying experience when everything just works out.

Of course, the creative process doesn’t just stop when you press the shutter. You need an effective software when moving on to the next phase of file management and post-processing. In my case. I have found a reliable partner – Capture One Pro.

I understand that learning a new software can get frustrating and time consuming but critical when trying to enhance your output. I have found it beneficial to migrate to Capture One Pro because it is fast, customizable to my needs, and boosts my overall productivity.

For this edition of my exploration with Capture One Pro, I will share my workflow for creating what I call “ethereal portraits”. In my experimentations with conceptualizing, shooting, and post-processing various types of portraits, my preference for simulating ethereal, other-wordly or “heavenly” images has intensified. You will notice this in my recent creations.

Below, I have shared my process for recreating a previous photo I made in Lightroom into an “ethereal grade” image in Capture One. My gear and the settings for shooting the image I use as reference were as follows:

Fujifilm GFX50s with a GF32-64mmF4 lens at 35mm
SS 1/60th
F/4.0
ISO 200
One Paul C. Buff Einstein 640 with a 47″ Octa powered by a Vagabond VLX battery.

RAW Image

Above is the RAW image that we will be working on. Below is the image that I edited using Lightroom.

Lightroom Graded Image

First off, we need to know the settings that I made in Lightroom.

Adobe Lightroom Settings

Lightroom Basic Exposure

A bump in the Exposure around a stop +1.10, Hightlights of -73 and opened the Shadows to +57.

Lightroom HSL

Next, I shifted the Hue on the Yellow to -100 and Green to -100. Took the Saturation back. Red -5, Orange -11, Yellow -51 and Green -45. Luminance remained untouched.

For the Split toning, I shifted Highlights to a Cyanish tone of 183 Hue and a little Saturation of 18. Shadows to an Brownish tone of 48 and Saturation of 25.

That’s about it for the Lightroom adjustments. Now, let’s move on to recreating this to Capture One Pro.

Capture One Pro Settings

Let’s start in the Color Tab. I assume you already exported your image to Capture One.

Capture One Pro – Color Tab

In the Base Characteristics Tool, I chose Fujifilm PRO Neg. Std in the Curve dropdown to apply my favorite Fujifilm Film Simulation.

Base Characteristics Tool

Capture One Pro – Color Editor Tool

I proceeded in the Color Editor Tool and color picked the leaves part of the image using the Color Picker Tool. Adjusted the HSL values to Hue -20, Saturation -17.9. Again, my adjustments here are based on just eyeballing the color. To get it as close as possible to the Lightroom version, I exported a .TIF of the Lightroom graded file and just kind of switching back and forth to see if I am close enough with my adjustments. I noticed that I was not selecting enough yellow and greens so I switched to the Advanced Tab to add more yellow and green to the selection and adjust the HUE to match.

Capture One Pro – Exposure Tab

Next is the Exposure Tab. This is where we adjust tonal and luminance values.

Still eyeballing, I recovered Highlight first in the High Dynamic Range Tool then proceeded to adjust the Levels lifting a bit of Shadow to 5, Mids to -0.13 and Highlights to 203. Then lastly adjusted the Exposure to -0.77. Everything is looking pretty close but I feel the white on the dress is duller than our reference so I used the Luma Range Mask, a new tool in Capture One Pro 12.

Capture One Pro – Layers Tool / Luma Range

I created an adjustment layer (Layer 1) and used Luma Range to select the dress part. When you do this, you may find that some aspects of the images that have same luminance also get selected. I can fine tune the mask by selecting the (E) Erase mask tool and remove the unwanted mask area around the dress, ultimately leaving only the dress selected.

Back on the Layers Tool, I selected Layer 1, the adjustment layer we just created and applied the Luma Mask to and ever slightly bumped Brightness to 12.

Capture One Pro – Layers Tool

And there you go. Final image color graded through Capture One Pro 12.

Final Image Processed through Capture One Pro 12

I will end this blog by emphasizing my essential reason for choosing to switch to Capture One Pro.

As a Fujifilm X shooter, I value the “film simulation” capability of my mirrorless cameras. With Capture One Pro, I am able to optimize this feature because it is compatible with my own color preference and ambitions for post processing, in this case – creating ethereal images.

5 features Quentin Décaillet can’t live without

NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One. To learn more about our latest version, click here.

Capture One is without a doubt the most powerful raw converter software I’ve used in my career. I tried many different apps before making the switch, but I was never pleased with the results I got from the other solutions. When I shifted all of my editing over to Capture One, I learned slowly, one step at a time, and discovered the power of all the advanced features it has to offer. In this article, I’ll show you a few of the Pro features and tools that I couldn’t live without anymore and what you may be missing out on by relying on the Express version.

The Express version for Fujifilm and Sony is a fantastic way to get started with Capture One without having to invest too much time or money. It has all the core features you need to edit your pictures quickly and get more out of your images than when shooting JPEG. When I left Lightroom and Aperture for Capture One, I almost exclusively used the basic features, as I didn’t know how to use the rest properly. Back then, there wasn’t as much Capture One learning content out there as there is today. For about a full year, I didn’t use half as many of the features that I use now. At the time, I would have been more than satisfied with the Express version. However, as you read on about the features below, you’ll see that today is a whole different story!
Ready to upgrade to Capture One Pro? Sign up for a 30-day trial.

Color Balance Tool

Let’s start with the Color Balance tool. If I were left with the choice of only retouching skin or editing color on a picture, I’d pick color in a heartbeat. Colors are crucial to set the mood, help the viewer read the image, and balance the composition. The color balance tool is nothing new to those who edit video as well, but surprisingly, no other current photo editing app offers a similar tool, aside from Capture One Pro.

The Color balance tool lets you place colors in the shadows, midtones, or highlights independently, without having to create a luminosity mask for each. It’s very visual to use, relying upon chroma wheels to adjust any setting, and thus you don’t need much color theory knowledge to get great results.

I use this tool a lot when editing weddings to correct color cast issues – it’s especially useful for those reception shots when the lighting condition is less than ideal.

However, it’s not limited to color correction, and it can be used to grade a shot and set the mood. I love using it on layers for beauty and commercial work, it gives me so much control!

Layers

Speaking of layers, let’s go more in depth and talk about them. It’s probably the one single feature I couldn’t live without in Capture One Pro! It works similarly to the adjustments layers found in Photoshop except that one layer can combine multiple adjustments.

I generally use multiple layers to edit my beauty and portrait work. I like to keep luminosity work, color correction, and color grading separated, so I get as much control as possible. I can easily adjust the opacity of each layer individually and thus alter the look of an image quickly.

Moreover, since Capture One Pro 12, I can even create luminosity masks to go further into my editing and diminish my Photoshop work even more! If you don’t do much texture work or don’t need very advanced masking tools, with the layer features found in Capture One, you can skip the Photoshop step altogether.

Advanced color editor

However, that’s not to say Capture One doesn’t have advanced masking tools. The color editor can be used to create precise color based masks easily or refined color adjustments as well if the Color Balance isn’t enough for the task at hands.

If you use Capture One Express, you probably know all about the basic color editor tab – at least, I hope you do and use it religiously. With the advanced tab, a new world opens up! You can now create custom color channels, and if the adjustment of a single channel is not enough, you can duplicate it to make the change even pronounced! Changing the hue of an element has never been easier!

However, if you don’t want to apply the setting to the whole picture, you can also create a mask based on your color selection. The advanced and skin tone tabs let you create a mask based on your selection and then erase any parts you don’t want to touch.

Also, last but not least, the color editor offers a skin tone tab. If you are a portrait, beauty, fashion, or wedding photographer, you’ll love this feature and wonder why you didn’t know about it before. Every day, I see users on facebook or instagram complaining about skin tones and how difficult they are to uniformize. With the skin tone tool, it’s easy! Pick the skin tones, adjust the hue, saturation, and brightness sliders for uniformity and you’re done! If the adjustment is not precise enough, rely on a mask to apply it locally.

Tethered Capture

Tethering is actually what lead me to find Capture One in the first place. I started shooting in studio and thought it’d be nice to see my image on the computer during the shoot. I started shooting tethered with Lightroom, but it would just keep crashing on me. Then, I noticed quite a few commercial photographers relying on Capture One for their tethered workflow. So I tried it, and quickly realized how powerful and reliable it was! It was and remains in a completely different league to Lightroom.

In a typical studio session, I’ll set my lights, take a test image, edit it, and then shoot the images the client needs. What’s excellent with Capture One, is that 80% of my editing is done once the shoot is over because the settings of the edited shot will carry onto the next ones. I can also pick the images I want to retouch as I shoot them, so I don’t need to spend time culling afterward, but instead, start retouching right away or simply export and send the files to a retoucher.

Furthermore, if you master the session workflow, shooting tethered becomes even more powerful. Sessions are designed to make the studio photographer workflow as fast and efficiently as possible. I like to create different capture folders, so I can have images from one look going into one folder, a second look into another one and keep all my prelight test shots separated.

Capture One’s ability to keep my images neat, organized and edited as I go feels like having an automated digitech on my side. If you are serious about shooting in studio or want to save time, sessions and tethered capture will make a significant difference to your workflow – and I’d even venture to say that it will make a huge difference to your image quality too, because it will free your mind and let you focus on what’s in front of you.

Workspaces

One last feature I’d like to talk about before I let you get back to your editing in Capture One is the workspaces. One of the reasons I could never get used to Lightroom was the fact that the interface wasn’t customizable. In Capture One Pro you can move around the tools, create different tabs or keep everything in a single tab, alter the keyboard shortcuts, and save all of this for future jobs.

I personally edit weddings, beauty, and still life work. Because my workflow is different for each genre, I change my workspace accordingly. For weddings, my editing is all about speed. I want to get through the images as quickly as possible without having to move my cursor around too much. It’s also crucial for me that the speed doesn’t come at the expense of image quality.

When editing beauty or still life work, the process is much more about refining the image and getting the most out of it before retouching it in Photoshop.

As each photographer and each genre is different, it’s essential that the interface can easily and quickly be modified. Workspaces are fantastic for that reason. A well-designed workspace will make the software work for you and not the other way around.

In this blog post, I’ve listed some of the features that, for me, make Capture One Pro the superior choice when it comes to photo editing. It has clear advantages over Capture One Express for professional photographers or enthusiasts looking to take their editing and images to the next level.

If you are still unsure whether it’s worth it for you, take advantage of the free trial and experiment with every feature I’ve mentioned above. During the 30-day trial period, you’ll have plenty of time to play and see how Capture One Pro can help improve your workflow.