Retouching Food Photos is Simple as Pie

In this post:  retouching food photos, the challenges in taking photos under less than ideal conditions, photo editing – creating realistic photos, avoiding promoting your restaurant or food using poor quality images.

Key Lime Pie - Photo After RetouchedRetouching food photos is required to fix photos taken under less than ideal conditions. Take for instance the photo on the left. It was snapped on a glorious day with a blue sky. The sunlight was still soft and the sun was in the right place in the sky. However, the pie’s pudding was a bit wet and the graham cracker crust was uncooperative. Sometimes, ideal conditions don’t exist. 

With photo retouching, a fine line exists between a realistic photo and perfection gone too far. At Flying Compass, we strive to retouch an image to the point that a realistic photo could have been taken under ideal conditions.

To achieve this after-the-fact, we removed the dripping pudding and smoothed out its texture, brightened or lightened select areas and added new crust missing on the vertical edge. It took less than 60 minutes and a little imaging magic to make it perfect. After all, we know restaurant meals are all about the experience. See the before image above and the updated image (below).

The Palm Pavilion Beachside Grill & Bar serves Key Lime Pie. Guests can enjoy meal while overlooking the Gulf of Mexico and expansive Clearwater Beach from its deck.

The “new” key lime pie photo was then submitted to the editor of Allegiant Airline’s Sunseeker inflight magazine in hope that it would be featured in an upcoming story.

We’re happy to report it did make the final cut. Take a look at the three images in this article. Which slice sits up and makes you pay attention? Which one lets you in on the type of experience you’ll have or what the view will be like when enjoying each bite? Which photo would make you say to yourself, “I know where I want to go for lunch” before you even get off the plane?

Sure, the original image could have been sent to the publication. However, Allegiant serves more than 59 locations in key feeder markets that fly in and out of this destination’s airport. The publisher reports each issue of Sunseeker’s Eastern edition reaches 1.6 million passengers. The local chamber advises, of those numbers, 110,000 visitors travel to their specific area each month.

I think you’ll agree that the one hour of digital magic made this image stand out among the competition and was well worth the time and minor expense to create the ideal key lime pie photo.

If you have an image that you’d like to take up a notch, reach out to us at Flying Compass so we can discuss it further.

Skip to content