Creating mouth-watering images is key to making your restaurant stand out in a crowded market. With social media and review sites playing a huge role in customers’ decisions on where to eat, ensuring your branding has tempting, high quality photos should be a priority.
Showcase Your Signature Dishes
First and foremost, the images need to showcase your signature dishes in the best possible light. This starts with the food preparation – make sure the ingredients used are fresh, vibrant and nicely styled on the plate. Play around with different garnishes, colours and arrangements until you have the most appealing outcome. Lighting is also crucial – use natural light where possible and ensure there are no harsh shadows being cast.Â
Expert Photography is Essential
Next is the photography itself. If you don’t have experience in food photography, consider hiring a professional food photographer who can bring your dishes to life. Investing in some quality photography will pay dividends through enticing more customers. The images should look bright, crisp and make the viewer instantly hungry. Use some close up detail shots mixed in with full dish photos to showcase textures and components.
Editing and Filters
Getting the right editing and filters on your photos can take them to the next level. Tools like Adobe make the process easy. Using the ‘before and after template’ filters can transform flat, lifeless images into mouth-watering masterpieces, and with these 24 free templates, your before and after photographs will look amazing. Subtle colour correction combined with slight increases in contrast, clarity and vibrance goes a long way. Just don’t overdo it and make the images look artificial.
Use Video Content
If possible, employing some video content alongside your image assets can really bring your branding to life. Professional quality video showcasing your dishes, restaurant and chefs in action makes for great social media content. Short 15-30 second snippets of dishes being plated up works well to draw viewers in and stimulate the appetite.
Maintain Brand Consistency
Consistency across your entire visual branding portfolio is key. Customers need to instantly recognise your images and videos as belonging to your restaurant regardless of what platform they see them on. Using cohesive styles, palettes, textures, themes and arrangements throughout all your photos and videos will help achieve this instant recognition that amplifies your branding. This consistent style and quality that ties everything together as part of your restaurant’s identity can be achieved through elements like using the same food plating principles and backdrops in your photoshoots, maintaining a consistent filter and editing style, and incorporating your restaurant’s logo, color scheme, or other brand elements into both your imagery and videos.
By curating a selection of beautifully shot imagery and videos centred around your incredible dishes, you’ll have a great asset to boost your restaurant’s brand. Tempting visual content engages customers, drives word of mouth and has a direct impact on your bottom line sales. Maintain this valuable branding tool by updating and adding to it regularly. Consistently delivering mouth-watering images is the best way to keep hungry customers walking through your doors.
Publisher of Hospitality and Leisure News, 365 Retail, Retail Source and organiser of the Creative Retail Awards.
