How Cameras and Light LIE About Food

this video is sponsored by Skillshare an incredible website where you can learn about food photography or virtually anything else there's more than 25,000 courses to choose from for less than $10 a month get two months for free with my link in the description hey let me show you a trick cooking show medical show cooking show medical show cooking show medical show lights camera screens three things that have incredible influence over how you perceive food and three things that absolutely can lie to you you think it doesn't matter check this out earlier this year researchers at Kansas and Tennessee state universities published a study where they deliberately undercooked a bunch of ground turkey patties they cut the patty is open and took pictures of them under different kinds of light bulbs and then they showed those pictures to a bunch of people and said hey would you eat this when looking at the patties under newer kinds of bulbs like soft white LED and halogen bulbs people were more likely to say yeah I'd eat that in reference to dangerously undercooked poultry look I'm not trying to say that you're gonna die of food poisoning if you don't watch this video experts say this will definitely kill you what is it film at 11:00 but at the very least learning a bit of the color theory behind all of this can help you take better instagrams of your dinner and it can help you spot when food marketers are trying to manipulate you it can also help you understand the humbling extent to which our own senses are simply untrustworthy let's go back to my opening example that's a plate of ham the rosy red color of which has been set with sodium nitrite I am flipping a switch back and forth that is changing the color temperature warm light cool light one light cool light the color of your light 100% affects the color of anything you're taking a picture of as Christina Peters a professional food photographer in Los Angeles who's been doing this stuff for a quarter century so color temperature is the Kelvin scale so that's where the color will be blue neutral is too warm you're going to be looking a little golden a little warm or a little bit blue on the cool side I think it's important that we understand them we talk about color temperature we're not talking about literal thermal temperature when you think about incandescent something that gets so hot that it emits electromagnetic radiation within our visual spectrum aka color blue things are actually hotter than red or yellow things but that's the opposite of how we tend to think about this particular color spectrum in our everyday lives blue is cool to us yellows reds oranges they're the color of fire they're warm yellow and blue are actually complementary colors meaning they're on directly opposite sides of the color wheel when you mix them together they cancel each other out and you get some kind of gray that's probably why we think about these colors as being on opposite ends of a single spectrum so even though it's not literally temperature we still measure color along this blue to yellow spectrum with a thermal scale Kelvin now look what happens when I take this photo of one of my steaks and make the temperature warmer ie more yellow now watch me make it cooler I eat more blue it looks like binging with babish right babish unlike me is an experienced filmmaker and his videos have a really cinematic look one of the ways he achieves that is by making everything kind of blue blueish for various reasons is right now the chosen color scheme among big-budget Hollywood film makers when I was in college everything was green think the matrix now everything is blue think Game of Thrones anyway back to food restaurants tend to favor warm light a graduate student at Iowa State University named Amy Elizabeth siani actually did an experiment on this she had some people sit down for a meal without telling them what she was doing she gradually changed the color temperature around the diners and at various points she asked them how they were feeling and people felt measurably more comfortable under warm lights Christina Peters says food photographers have known about this forever in general warm light makes people feel better and it makes food look better remember food show hospital show warm light cool light I always warm up my food images I always warm up my people images as well because it's more pleasing to the skin to have a warmer tone than a blue tone with any person in addition to color temperature there's another color spectrum that we tend to think about if color temperature is hopping from blue to yellow along opposite sides of the color wheel tint is going from magenta to green Peters actually ran into a tint problem one time when she was shooting for a high-end grocery store shooting the meat department specifically this is not that grocery store but it's a similar one if you kind of look at one type of light and look over at the meat department your eyes take a second to adjust to it and it looked very magenta this was like oh my gosh they're filtering that so I got my color meter and I put it up against the lights that were inside the meat meat department and they were massively magenta they were trying to make their meat look really red because they know that's what US consumers expect of beef in particular they're also trying to compensate for the fact that cut raw beef actually turns Brown as it oxidizes the color of light has a particularly big impact on how we perceive steak on the website Chowhound there's a great thread where some restaurant servers are complaining about a common problem they take a perfectly pink steak to a diner on an outdoor patio and the diner insists that their steak is overdone why because the sky is blue and therefore natural sunlight tends to be cool here watch I'm gonna cook a steak cut it up and there it is under the warm lights of my kitchen now Lauren is gonna carry it out into the living room I'm having to adjust for brightness but I'm not touching color now we're in the living room nothing but natural light from the windows and look at that it doesn't look as rare does it the meat industry knows this check out this lighting guide created by food scientists at Kansas State and my alma mater Penn State this is aimed at retailers grocery stores butchers that chart actually shows how different meats look more or less perfectly pink depending on color temperature restaurants know this too as you can see on Twitter I am NOT the only person to observe that steak houses tend to behave like few windows near the dining area a prime example of this get it prime would be one of America's biggest steakhouse chains Ruth's Chris I sent an email to them asking if they indeed keep out natural sunlight in an effort to cast a nice warm artificial glow on their steaks thus making them look nice and pink hi Adam thanks for reaching out this is quite interesting unfortunately Ruth's Chris is unable to provide a response at this time can neither confirm nor deny but I'll give you further evidence in the form of the exception that proves the rule one of America's oldest steak houses Peter Luger in New York is bathed in natural light huge windows all around the dining area as a result the steaks tend to look kind of weird at least during lunchtime you can see the folks from Fox's eater struggling with this phenomenon in a video that they made about Peter Luger I suspect they intentionally ordered their steaks unusually rare and they clearly did some color grading to this footage to make sure that the steaks look pink despite the sunlight how do I know for sure because they forgot to do it to this one shot see when I skip from here to here whoops now one of the reasons you might not have noticed this phenomenon until now is that good quality will operated cameras do have a way of compensating for differences in the color of light it's called white balance here watch Lauren is gonna carry the plate of ham from the warm lights inside the house to the natural light in the living room and then out onto the front walkway look super blue now watch what happens when I adjust my camera to a white balance calibrated specifically for sunlight it fixes the problem basically white balance is changing your camera's color sensitivity with the goal of making say a white thing look white in any lights most cameras have an auto white balance function but they don't always get it right so if you can control that manually you might want to try playing with that our human perceptual system actually adjusts for the color of light too when we look at things in real life because our eyeballs are constantly color correcting every second where our eyes are open our eyes are amazing and that's what makes this so challenging because we don't actually see light the way the camera is seeing the light I can't tell you the number of times I have been shooting food in this kitchen and I'll look at the monitor and then I'll look at the food in real life and I look at the monitor and look at the food in real life and they're just not the same like I cooked this steak I ate this steak this steak was perfectly medium-rare and it doesn't look like that in the camera I fear eyes dat the time this might have been due to the cool natural light coming into my kitchen from the windows but Christina Peters says it could have been all kinds of things and especially when you're photographing something like a at stake that probably has moisture on the surface even as you're looking at the stake and staring at it if you were to change your angle just by a few degrees you'll notice reflections coming in or it gets darker you can read about all this stuff on Peters is excellent food photography blog.com when she's shooting for clients Peter says she has to do all kinds of crazy things that are way over my head backlighting three-point lighting jelling the lens she uses decades of experience and technical know-how to make her shots look color accurate or not I'm very inaccurate a lot of the time because I'm trying to make the food look appealing and so there are times when the steak might actually be overdone and then I can just kick an extra light in there lighten it up a little bit in the center and it looks like it's medium it's such a hard thing for us to accept because we are so used to trusting our senses seeing is believing but it shouldn't be especially when you're looking at a photo or a video here let me give you one more example dynamic range it's really hard for cameras to accurately render color on the extremes of brightness extremely light things called highlights tend to get rounded up to white and extremely dark things called shadows tend to get rounded down to black this is one reason why everyone's food photos on Instagram and Twitter tend to look and burned like that sandwich looks kind of burned and I'm almost certain that it wasn't a very inexpensive camera doesn't have a very large dynamic range a very high-end digital back will have a very large large dynamic range so it can see things more detail and darks your phone camera is a cheap camera for example but most phones these days now have an HDR shooting mode high dynamic range it basically takes multiple exposures in rapid succession at various exposure levels and then composites them together it's a lie everything is a lie I hope at the very least this video has made you a little bit more of a savvy less credulous consumer of food Media and indeed all media if you don't believe that cameras are lying to you get one out and start shooting a bunch of food with it you will develop an intuitive understanding of how the screens in our lives are profoundly warping our perception of reality that is certainly what I have learned making videos in here for you though if you want to learn a little faster might I suggest Skillshare Skillshare has tons of amazing photography and videography courses check out Tabitha parks course on Adobe Lightroom which is a great program for doing color grading and other quick edits to your photos if you ever wonder why some people's instagrams look way better than yours this is one reason why I never share images that I haven't edited and Lightroom is king then you might want to graduate up to Adobe Camera Raw and Elizabeth Weinberg has a great Skillshare course about how to use just that to get those cinematic colors and other looks these courses aren't just video tutorials Skillshare courses give you homework and a community where you can try out what you're learning and get feedback on it and it's not just photography there's tons of courses about business about technology almost anything you could want to learn about to broaden your skillset and maybe make a career change because you watch my channel you can get two months of Skillshare premium for three just follow my signup link in the description thanks so much to Skillshare for sponsoring this video and remember don't believe your eyes can I eat it now yeah go ahead

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 660,979

Rating: 4.9477081 out of 5

Keywords: food photography tricks, food photography tips, food photography, how to photograph food, food photography lighting, food photography editing, food photography lighting techniques, dark food photography tutorial, food photography composition, food photography tricks instagram, food photography tricks iphone, food photography tricks with phone, how to photograph food in a restaurant, steakhouses, restaurant lighting, natural light, peter luger steakhouse, ruths chris

Id: vp3qE63cugk

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/rileyrulesu]

God I hate that title. It's like no one knows how photography works.

[u/FizzyGizmo]

The temperature of light being used is irrelevant though? The white balance of the camera can be set to whatever you want, so if you want to shoot with natural light just make sure the white balance is set appropriately. It should only ever be an issue if you're mixing Daylight and Tungsten.

[u/PurpleDinosaurPussy]

That was cool

[u/DisgustingNekbeard69]

Geat vid

Same shit

It could have been over in half the time you took

[u/[deleted]]

Agreed, it’s gross. And the cognitive dissonance here is so disturbing

[u/Shenaniganz08]

fuck off this this clickbait bullshit