Pecan Pie, Ginger Ice Cream & Toffee Sauce

Hi Guys,

First post and a huge amateur when it comes to any kind of photography. I've joined to get tips and tricks specifically in food photography so I'll be sure to be scrolling through these threads momentarily.

For the moment, below is my latest recipe.

Pecan Pie, Ginger Ice Cream and Toffee Sauce.

Looks very rich and delicious. Never heard of ginger ice cream before... Going to have to try to find some of that!

Your first shot looks too dark to me. Maybe brighten it up a bit and add a little more contrast. The background is sort of distracting and the blue cast isn't helping it either. Maybe try desaturating and lightening the blues.

Second and third shots are much better. Like the composition, warm colors, nice mix of textures. Maybe just a bit brighter and opening up the shadows a bit to get some more detail.

Last shot seems a bit too dark again and maybe needs a better white balance on the plate. I'm thinking the near edge of the pie crust needs to be more sharply focused too.

So... Who makes a good ginger ice cream anyways?

Thanks! General consensus seems to be they're too dark - just had the third photo (my favourite) accepted on FoodGawker but I had to ramp up the exposure on the version above as they said it was too dark. It's kind of the way I like it, but perhaps I went overboard!

Thanks for the tips! The next recipe I do I'll be sure to take these into consideration.

You can find full recipe here:

All Thyme Favourites

Not knowing what kind of monitor you have or the editing software you're working with, I'm wondering if a bit of monitor calibration or adjustment might give you a better idea of how your images actually look. Unless you're making prints or doing pre-press work you probably don't really need an expensive monitor or any calibration hardware.

I think most Adobe software includes an app called Adobe Gamma and some monitors and graphics cards software may contain something similar as well. It can be used to get your monitor's brightness and contrast set properly and does a fair job with color calibration as well. It may not be "professionally perfect" but will help prevent blown out highlights and loss of details in shadows.

And if you haven't already, you may want to learn at least the basics of reading histograms. They won't tell you if you've taken a perfectly exposed shot. But if something doesn't look the way you expected it to they can make it easier to make the proper corrections when editing.