As I promised Zorra of Kochtopf - 1x umrühren bitte that I will participate in the fourth edition of Food-o-grafie with Software as the theme, here I am writing you the post about software I use in editing my food photos.

If you think I am using a modern and sophisticated software as the famous Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom, you are wrong. I don't know how to edit photo in Photoshop though I have PS CS3 on my laptop. At present, what I always did in my PS CS3 is only making watermark and putting them on my photo as all editing was done with another software, a user friendly one.

In my early time of photography, I used Picasa to edit all my photos, but after one year using it, I found that it is not enough for me. So I surfed the net to search another software.

I am really glad that I bumped into this software that suits to my need in photo editing and the most important "user friendly". This software is similar to Lightroom, but more easy to use and understand. It can be used to process RAW, JPEG and TIFF image files as I was curious to try shooting in RAW. It's called PhotoStudio Darkroom.

I started to shoot in RAW since last February and I found it really fun as you can do more in editing than shooting in JPEG. Though shooting in RAW gives me more flexibility and possibility in editing, but I've always tried my best to do less editing as possible. In my book, a photo with heavy editing is like a beautiful girl with tons of make up in her face. Lose her natural beauty!

Yup! I am the biggest fan of natural looking photographs, especially food photos. IMHO, food photo doesn't need heavy editing otherwise it will look artificial and make me lose my appetite. Heavy editing is not my cup of tea.

I will share you the two type of image files that I edited with PhotoStudio Darkroom.


1. JPEG image:



The photo above I shot with JPEG and the editing process was in increasing contrast, brightness and sharpness. I also cropped the upper side of the spoon. That's all.



2. RAW image:



The photo above I shot in RAW file. The editing occurred in increasing contrast, cropping and straightening the image so the cake stood out clearly. That's all.


As you might notice that I set my white balance to cloudy for those photo above since I shot them when the sky was cloudy. You can see as well that I love taking photo when it almost dawn as the light is soft. When I shot during shiny day, I always used daylight as the white balance.

Hope my short posting about software and the before-after photos could give you something.

Have a nice day mates!