Perfect Color Matching in Food Photography

A good food photo makes your mouth water, awakens the desire to cook the same dish, and inspires the photographer in us to also take such a great food shot. But perfect food styling is not always easy. Luckily, there are tools like ColorReader EZ that can help with the color selection and color palette inspiration for the photo shoot.

Perfect food styling of a pumpkin soup.

When food photographer Heike Herden wants to present a new recipe on her blog or stage food and products for a client, colors play a very important role. She loves to be inspired by the color of the food she’s creating. Depending on the recipe, season and mood, her color palettes can range from harmonious monochromatic hues to schemes with intense color contrasts.

To find the perfect color scheme, she likes to use the ColorReader EZ with its many creativity-inspiring functions – something she demonstrates to us using the example of an easy-to-make pumpkin soup.

Pumpkin soup with smoked salmon and parsley –
an image that makes your mouth water!

Heike wants to stage the pumpkin soup in a visually creative way and uses the ColorReader EZ for her color inspiration on set. To do this, she first measures the color of the pumpkin skin as the base color, because the finished soup should dominate the picture with its paler orange color and stand out. Since the soup will end up being more like the color of the pumpkin flesh, she also scans this and chooses it for her baseline color.

Having set the perfect orange color as her starting point, she uses the feature “Coordinate Colors” in the ColorReader app for coordinating color ideas and creates different color palettes that work well with the base shade and that she likes. Her favorite palette includes pink and green, so she decides to add smoked salmon and parsley to her soup for added color.
She also selects the green background based on the color palette and adds other accessories that correspond to the suggestions of the various color palettes: beige plates, pampas grass and a piece of natural fabric. Heike places all of this on the green background to see if she really likes the color scheme – and then arranges everything the way she wants to photograph it.

Heike shows the process of her food styling in the studio and explains how the ColorReader EZ is being used in this video:

Heike Herden is a freelance photographer and author from Cologne, Germany, who specializes in food photography. Since she is also a foodie who loves to cook and bake, she has her own food blog, too. Her recipes and appetizing food photos make your mouth water and inspire readers to try her recipes as well as photograph their own culinary creations.