How to photograph cookies?

Last Updated :

Say goodbye to ugly photos of your favourite cookies. If you work hard at making cookies for your loved ones, then it definitely deserves a little effort while photographing them.  Cookies, of all sizes, shapes, fillings and decorations can look extra deliciously sweet if you photograph them right.

If you are a professional baker, it is all the more vital that you have good photographs of your products to build a strong portfolio. This is what will attract customers as you can show them your previous work of fancy cookies. A bad photo will not look appealing to a client and they might not decide to bring business to you.

Apart from the basic photography rules, follow these steps to make your baked treats look like superstars.

1. The basic rule of food photography is to use natural light and not the built-in flash. To take amazing photos, place your cookies next to a window and let the natural soft lighting fall on the plate full of cookies.

2. It is best to shoot cookies against a white background, as light will be reflected evenly all across the objects in your frame. To achieve this, you can fold a 5x5 piece of white poster or foam board. Place it in such a way that one fold becomes the base on which to place the plates, while the other fold works as a background.

3. Make your own lightbox, which is a simple DIY process. All you need are four stands of 2 ft or more and cover it with a white muslin or cotton cloth from three sides and the top. This will look like a tent, in which you can keep your cookies. Place this setup next to a big window or any other bright spot in your house/bakery. The cloth helps diffuse the light.

4. Be creative with the styling of your cookies. Use appropriate platters and props for them. You can shoot them on a cookie sheet as that itself makes for a nice background. Use ingredients of the cookies as props for added effect.

5. Take close-ups as much as possible. Cookies, which are usually small in size, look best when the details, texture and colour is clearly visible in the photos. Use that to your advantage and show off these baked treats.

95,000+ PicBackMan Users

95,000+ Users Trust PicBackMan To Backup Precious Memories

money back guarantee
Kip Roof testimonial Kip Roofgoogle photos flickr
PicBackMan does exactly what it's supposed to. It's quick and efficient. It runs unobtrusively in the background and has done an excellent job of uploading more than 300GB of photos to 2 different services. After having lost a lot of personal memories to a hard drive crash, it's nice to know that my photos are safe in 2 different places.
Julia Alyea Farella testimonialJulia Alyea Farella smugmug
LOVE this program! Works better than ANY other program out there that I have found to upload thousands of pictures WITH SUB-FOLDERS to SmugMug! Thank you so much for what you do! :) #happycustomer
Pausing Motion testimonialPausingMotionsmugmug
I pointed PicBackMan at a directory structure, and next time I looked - all the photos had uploaded! Pretty cool. I use SmugMug and while I really like it, the process of creating directories in is pretty laborious when you need to make 80+ at a time. This was a breeze. Thank you!