Ultimate Food Photo Edit Tutorial: How I Edit my Photos

Today I am sharing with you the ultimate food photo edit tutorial where I reveal every trick in my book to help you edit your pictures better in Photoshop.

I am going to share a whole bunch of my trade secrets with you today: how to do a better food photo edit. Now, this post is focused on food photography but you can use these tricks for any picture.

Of course, the idea is to take a better picture in the first place that requires as little editing as possible. I am still working on that. But even the most seasoned food photographer will need to touch up a few things in post-production.

I am letting the cat out of the bag, they do the same thing as I am about to show you!

I played around for years with Photoshop without really knowing what I was doing. Then one day I came across a few excellent tips and I was very happy with the results.

And I also had the opportunity to take an advanced Photoshop class through work for my day job but picked up as many gold nuggets I could for the food photography.

Now, this tutorial is for Photoshop but many of the features are available in Lightroom (which I mostly use now), or in any or most of the paid or good free photo editing software.

Also this tutorial assumes you are somewhat already familiar with Photoshop and know where the basic features are located. On with the food photo edit tutorial…

Photoshop for Food Photography

I am going to use a photo from my Boozy Peaches and Cream Trifle recipe blog post for demonstration purposes. Now I don’t use every single one of the steps below each time. Every photo is different.

But for this tutorial, I have applied every Photoshop trick I know to help you edit your pictures better, including the best way to sharpen an image: the high pass filter technique. I bet many of you did not know that one!

Food Photo Edit Tutorial

For each step I will show you a screen shot of Photoshop. Please check below for a printable version of the steps without the pictures. Make sure to print it out and follow along with your own images.

Open Photoshop
Open a photo in Photoshop
Make sure Layers panel is open on the right (Windows, Layers)
Crop your image
Apply an Auto Tone shift+ctrl L
Duplicate your layer ctrl J
In layers select soft light from drop down and adjust opacity to around 30%
Duplicate your layer ctrl J
In layers select overlay
Select brush tool and pick the color white
Select a size for the area you want to paint and lower harshness to zero
Paint in the areas you want to highlight
In the layers panel set your overlay at around 20% (I went back and set it at 15% later)
Open a Curves layer to adjust tonal range: add highlight by adding and moving one point on the top of the diagonal line. And add shadow by adding and moving one point on the bottom of the line. Don’t overdue it.
Open a Vibrance layer, here I chose vibrance on the slider at 30 (avoid the saturation slider)
I am happy with the edit but I want to sharpen the image a bit. First step is to flatten all my layers
Duplicate your layer ctrl J
Turn your photo black and white by pressing crtl U
In layers select overlay
Go in Filter, Other, High Pass
In the High Pass window select a radius, usually around 1.5 to 3. Check preview. Press OK.
‘Save as’ with a new name (good to keep original just in case)

And you are done!

Optional: add your watermark. And save for web (shift+alt+ctrl S) to reduce size to around 90 kb for the blog post so that it can load faster.
NOTE: every time I say open a ### layer, click the circle that is half dark half white in the menu in the bottom right . If you go here you create a layer for each modification, which means you are not destroying the original layer.