Photos for boards, windows and street displays

A photograph on a delivery app is looked at from thirty centimetres by someone who has already decided to order. A photograph in a window is glanced at from four metres by someone who is walking past and has decided nothing.

They are different jobs, and using the same image for both means one of them is wrong.

Distance changes everything about composition

At four metres, on a poster, detail disappears. Nobody sees the herb garnish, the texture of the crust or the reflection on the sauce. What they see is shape, colour and contrast.

So a window image needs:

One subject, large. A single dish filling the frame, not a table of several.

Strong colour separation. The food must be a different tone from what is behind it. A beige dish on a beige board is invisible at distance.

High contrast. Soft, subtle lighting that looks sophisticated at thumbnail size reads as murky on a poster.

Simplify rather than add

Instinct with a large format is to fill it. The opposite is correct.

An A-board with one photograph and four words outperforms one with six photographs and a full menu, because a person walking past has about a second and a half.

Choose the dish that most represents you and give it the whole space.

Resolution again, but more so

Large-format printing is where phone photographs can genuinely run out of pixels.

An A1 poster at proper print resolution wants around 7,000 pixels on the long edge, which is beyond most phones. In practice large-format printing is viewed from further away, so printers accept much lower resolution — often 150dpi or less — but you need to ask rather than assume.

Give your printer the largest original you have and ask whether it holds at the size you want. They will tell you honestly, because reprinting is their problem too.

Windows have their own light problem

A photograph in a window is behind glass, in daylight, often with the street reflected in it.

This is a display problem rather than a photography one, but it changes what works. High-contrast, bright images survive reflections. Dark, moody ones disappear entirely behind a reflection of the building opposite.

If your window faces the sun for part of the day, expect fading. Anything printed will need replacing more often than you think, so keep the files organised.

Match the season and the actual menu

Street displays stay up. A poster of a summer salad in November, or a dish you stopped serving in spring, does active damage — it brings in people who then order something else, or nothing.

Set a reminder to review street-facing photographs whenever the menu changes. It takes two minutes and it is the most commonly neglected part of a restaurant's visual presence.

Where staging helps at this scale

A single dish photographed at the pass can be staged for the app thumbnail, the printed menu and the window poster — three different backgrounds and moods from one capture, without cooking the dish three times.

For street display specifically, choose the higher-contrast, simpler scenes: a plain dark surface, or a bright clean one. The atmospheric, softly lit settings that work beautifully on a phone are the ones that vanish behind a reflection at four metres.