Why your dish photos look orange

A frequent complaint about restaurant photographs is that the food looks wrong in a way nobody can name. The dish was correct, the plating was good, and the photograph looks stale.

The cause is almost always colour temperature, and the fix takes less than a minute once you know what you are looking at.

Kitchens are lit by several different colours at once

A typical kitchen has fluorescent tubes overhead, which are green and cool. It has heat lamps at the pass, which are deep orange. It may have daylight from a door or window, which is neutral to blue. And it may have LED strips of unknown temperature under the shelving.

Your camera's automatic white balance tries to find one answer for all of them, and it lands somewhere wrong. The result is a photograph where the whites are not white, and once whites are not white nothing else looks right either.

Heat lamps are the worst offender

The lamp above the pass exists to keep food warm and it produces an extremely orange light. Anything photographed under it comes out amber, including the plate, the garnish and the tablecloth.

The single highest-impact change most kitchens can make is to photograph one step away from the heat lamp, in a spot lit by something else.

Set white balance manually

Every phone camera app with a professional or manual mode lets you set white balance in kelvin, and most cameras have a preset list.

Practically:

• Fluorescent tubes: around 4000K, and expect to correct green.
• Warm LED or incandescent: around 2800–3200K.
• Daylight from a door: around 5500K.
• Overcast daylight: around 6500K.

Set it once for your photography spot and stop thinking about it. The point of manual is not perfection; it is consistency, so that all your dish photographs share one colour rather than each having its own.

Use a white plate as your reference

You have an unlimited supply of neutral references: white china.

Photograph a dish, look at the plate on screen, and ask whether it is white. If it is cream, the photograph is too warm. If it is blue-grey, too cool. Adjust and reshoot — you are still inside the ninety seconds if you set up beforehand.

This is more reliable than judging the food, because you know what colour the plate is and you do not have a fixed reference for how a sauce should look.

Kill the overheads if you can

If your photography spot lets you switch off the tube above it, do. A single controlled light source with a known colour beats three uncontrolled ones every time, and it removes the green cast that fluorescent lighting adds to everything, particularly to greens and to skin tones if hands are in frame.

What a cast does to specific foods

Some dishes suffer more than others.

Green salads and herbs go grey-yellow under warm light and look wilted.

Red meat goes brown under green light and looks overcooked.

White fish, rice and pasta pick up any cast immediately because they have no colour of their own to hide it.

Fried food already sits in the orange range, so a warm cast pushes it into looking greasy.

If your menu is heavy on any of these, colour accuracy is worth the two minutes.

What restaging does and does not correct

Restaging places your dish in a new setting with new lighting, which resolves most of a bad kitchen environment. The dish keeps its plating, its portion and its own colours as photographed.

What it will not do is invent colour information that was destroyed at capture. Deep orange cast on white rice removes the distinction between rice and sauce, and nothing downstream recovers it. Set the white balance, check the plate is white, then shoot.