In the age of the smartphone, it’s easy for everyone to feel like they are a budding food photographer, but getting professional-looking photos of food can be difficult. Without giving away all your secrets – any tips you can share to help people create stunning food images?

Just like all types of photography, I believe food photography relies heavily on a beautiful subject, but you need great light and composition to make even the most delicious subject look appetizing. Having some nice lenses and a camera is great, but even if you’re shooting with a smartphone, you can make some great images.

My biggest tip is always to try and make your food the brightest part of your image. Flat light without shadows or highlights is a photo killer. You want your food to pop off the background, and having that subject be the brightest element in your image will make it stand out from the scene. Another simple tip is to use just a single light source, whether that’s your window or some artificial light, make sure there is only one light from a single direction entering your photo. This will make sure you have appropriate contrast with no mixing of different types of lights and color temperatures.

Editing plays a big part in food photography – with everything from image selection to fine adjustments playing a big role to help the subject look its best. process. Can you walk us through your usual process?

My usual editing process starts with image selection. I typically use Capture One to shoot tethered from my camera to my computer, so the images appear as I take them (which I have a custom button now on my Loupedeck CT that fires off my camera when I press it!) After the shoot comes to the long process of selecting the winning shots; sometimes I know right away and I rate the shots as I take them, but other times I’m sifting through 500 or so images per shoot.

After I’ve made my selections, I’ll start to develop the images using the sliders either in Capture One or in the Lightroom develop module. I usually create a general adjustment with things like white balance, exposure and contrast then sync those basic adjustments to all the other images I took during that session.

After the RAW images are processed, I’ll move over to Photoshop to remove blemishes, pieces of food that got out of place or to do more advanced composites combining multiple images together.

What were your first impressions of the Loupedeck CT?

It’s a beautiful product, I mean just looking at it, it looks great on the desk. I’m not going to lie, it was tough at first because I only have ever used the keyboard. However, after testing it out and working with it for a week or so, I was easily able to use it without taking my eyes off the monitor. It just took time for my brain to memorize where the dials and buttons are, but now it’s really fast.

As part of your job, you work with various people on-site, particularly food stylists. Have you been able to integrate the Loupedeck CT into your on-site shooting and what kind of difference has it made?

Yeah so that’s a funny thing, on set I always shoot tethered to my laptop, and the client or food stylists will often want to either take a picture, rotate, rate or cycle through the images. I would always have to show them how to do it in the software or tell them what the hotkey was, and most of the time it would be confusing, or I would have to explain it multiple times throughout the shoot. So now with the Loupedeck, I’ve created a couple of custom controls on the touch buttons that are clearly labeled for when clients or food stylists need them.

Would you recommend the Loupedeck to other creatives?

I would definitely recommend the Loupedeck to my friends and other creatives who do a lot of image or video work. I think it has a lot of fun and practical applications for speeding up that editing workflow but also on set as well. When you do a lot of editing and post-production, seconds add up to hours and days over the long term, so anything that will shave off time during that process is extremely valuable from a time standpoint.