Sorry for the long hiatus – can’t believe December completely slipped away. We did some shooting for a new client in December – Nokia – which kept us busy. Looking forward to shooting more projects for them this year.

As we wrap up the holidays, I thought I’d try and squeeze in one more fancy meal – a delicious egg dessert with fruit and a latté – delicious.

As with most of my shots involving food, this was shot using natural light – a long stretch of windows along the left side of the setup. The biggest problem when shooting something like this is to control the highlights on the shiny edge of the egg dessert facing the windows. Here is how the dessert looked before editing.

See how shiny and bright the left side of the egg is looking – not good. It’s gone specular – meaning it’s basically white with no details. There are a number of ways to solve this problem, but the simplest is to take another shot, but under-expose it enough to retain detail on the left side of the egg, like this.

Of course, this shot is too dark to use – the food looks dull and tired. We load the original shot above and this shot into Photoshop, and use the under-exposed shot to “paint in” the shiny parts of the egg with this under-exposed shot. We just paint over the shiny areas until we get a well-exposed egg, removing the blown out white areas.

The result – the first shot above. Scroll up and you’ll see how well this works to control over-exposures on shiny surfaces.