Food Photographer Q & A #2 :  by Simi Jois – My question : How important is post-processing to the final look of the image?

I guess you’ll have to be the judge of that.  Below the final image, I’ve posted the original one. As you can see, all, I’ve really done is to flip the image over, crop it a bid and the main thing that really helped the impact of the photo was that I intensified the color, especially in the water.  There really was no retouching to speck of, maybe a little “whiting out” of a ripple or two.  I guess that I also pumped up the contrast a bit too…

I’ve actually written an article on how to do this kind of photo and it’s on my “old” webpage.  And if you’re interested, there are a bunch of these kind of articles on the “Food Photography Tips” page of my website.

This key to getting this kind of shot right, is in repetition.  You just have to keep doing it over and over, learning from how you hold  the fruit when you drop in.  That’s the key really.  How you hold the fruit and and doing it a million times.

That’s the key, I mean, if you the technical stuff right… :o)  I don’t want to rewrite the whole article here, you you’ll just have to visit my blog page.

Here’s the un-retouched / un-cropped food photo, raw, right out of the camera. I knew ahead of time that we were going to flip the image vertically.

Here’s a photo of the set that I used for making this shot. Actually, it might of been one of the other “splash” shots I’ve done, but this will give you an idea of the process.

So, there you have it.  Again, if you want to learn more about doing this kind of shot, please visit my food photography tips article on the subject.  And if you want to receive a notice when I release another article or informative food photography blog post, please subscribe to my mailing list below. And… Please leave me a reply to let me know if you got anything out of my article.

Thanks for visiting the Food Photography Q & A Page.  If you have a question you’d like to have answered by a professional food photographer and you think that other people on this blog might be interested too, please ask me your food photography question, and I’ll get to it as soon as I can.  BTW – I tend to prioritize answering the questions of people that subscribe to my mail list… (hint, hint… :o)