How to Take Great Food Photos With Your Phone  

From styling your food, to lighting, composition and post-processing, if you follow these tips you’ll be well on your way to creating food photos that will be the envy of your followers on social media.  

Before you even start to take photos of food, you need to plan, and that involves taking the light into account. Food tends to look best under natural light, so to get the best results, you need to be shooting next to a window that doesn’t have direct sunlight on it. 

Think About  Lighting

1. Make sure you take the photo before you eat the food. That sounds obvious, but you know you’ve done it before! 2. Take some time to arrange the food on the plate so it looks appetizing. 3. Make sure there’s no ugly drips or splashes of sauce on the edges of the plate.

Food Styling

Your built-in smartphone camera does have limitations, so consider using a dedicated camera phone app to take your photos with.  Adobe Lightroom mobile is a popular choice, but there are others like the totally free Open Camera app, or MuseCam App. 

Camera App For Your Phone

Pro photographers usually shoot in RAW format because it is totally uncompressed, and contains all the information from a photo.  If your phone doesn’t support RAW format, go into the camera settings and select the highest resolution JPEG settings it has. The larger the JPEG, the higher the image quality. 

Try to Shoot in RAW Format

To get sharp, professional-looking photos, you need to take along a phone tripod. They’re not expensive – you can buy a smartphone tripod for around $10 on Amazon, and it can usually fit in your bag or pocket 

Use a Tripod in Low Light

A plain background with no clutter is best to showcase the food. Check the color of your background – is it too bright and overpowering? Can you change it, or move to a different position? 

Check Your Background

Most people will only take a photo of food from directly above or from straight ahead at eye level. When you get a different angle on your food, the image stands out from the norm. Try shooting from the sides, or get down level with the plate and shoot from there. 

Work the Angles

The camera screen is split up into 9 squares, with three lines running vertically, and three lines running horizontally. Where those lines intersect, along one of the lines or just above one of the horizontal lines is where you want to place the items of interest in your photo, as these make the most aesthetically pleasing composition. 

Composition

Another compositional tool to use is leading lines and diagonals. Leading lines are subtle or not-so-subtle straight or diagonal lines in an image that draw our eye to the main subject, in this case, food. 

Leading Lines

You need to put the main focus of the image on the food, as our eyes are drawn to look at what is in focus. If you have a bowl of soup and a slice of bread, for example, you would focus on the soup instead of the bread – unless the bread is your main subject. Place the focus point of your phone camera on the spot that you want to showcase. 

Controlling Focus

If you use your phone’s zoom function to get in close and fill the frame, you’ll end up with very poor image quality when you look at it closely. Try to get in closer to your subject if you can instead.  

Don’t Zoom

Most images will look better with a little adjustment after they have been taken, even if it’s just to correct exposure, color and contrast. Your phone will have a built-in editing suite, or you can use an app to help crop and adjust. 

Editing Your Image

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