Question 1

Do better menu photos actually increase orders?

Accepted Answer

The numbers come from the delivery platforms themselves. Deliveroo's own help center states restaurants with menu photography get 25% more orders, and Uber's merchant guide reports up to 88% higher monthly sales for restaurants with photos on every item. Your mileage will vary by cuisine and competition — a great photo won't save a bad kebab.

Question 2

How much does professional food photography cost for a restaurant?

Accepted Answer

In most EU cities a food photographer charges €400–900 for a half day, plus editing. In the US, $500–1,500 is typical and big-city rates go well past that. Count the retouching and you land somewhere between $30 and $70 per finished photo. That's manageable for a launch. It stings when the menu changes six weeks later and half the set is out of date.

Question 3

Is it still worth hiring a food photographer?

Accepted Answer

For some jobs, yes. Interiors, team portraits, a signature dish for a campaign, press material — a good photographer earns the rate there, and David (who built this) still takes those bookings himself. Where the math falls apart is routine coverage: sixty menu items, weekly specials, three delivery apps that each want every dish filled in. That volume work is what PlateRefresh exists for.

Question 4

How many photos does a restaurant actually need?

Accepted Answer

More than most owners guess. A typical single-location menu runs 30–80 items once sides, desserts and drinks are counted, and delivery platforms want a photo on every single one — items without photos reliably sell worse. Add rotating specials, social posts and the Google profile, and a place that "just needs a few shots" usually needs a few hundred per year.

Question 5

What's the cheapest way to get decent menu photos?

Accepted Answer

Shoot them yourself in daylight, then fix the lighting afterwards. Any phone from the last five years captures plenty of detail; what it can't do is light a plate like a studio, and that part can be added after the fact for under a dollar a dish. The other budget route — a photography student — can work too, but you still pay per shoot, wait on edits, and rebook every time the menu moves.

Question 6

How often should a restaurant update its menu photos?

Accepted Answer

Whenever the plate stops matching the picture: new dish, new plating, new portion size, new plateware. For most kitchens that means every menu revision, so two to four times a year, plus specials as they come. Delivery apps also quietly favour listings that look maintained — a menu where half the tiles are three years old reads like a place that might be closed.

Question 7

How do I take a good food photo with just a phone?

Accepted Answer

Get near a window, turn off the overhead lights, and shoot from about 45 degrees with the dish filling most of the frame. Wipe the plate rim. Shoot within a minute or two of plating, while everything still looks alive, and take five frames instead of one. That's 80% of it. The last 20% — clean studio light, true colour — is the part software can add afterwards.

Question 8

What angle should menu photos be shot from?

Accepted Answer

Two angles cover nearly everything. A 45-degree tilt — camera looking down at the front of the dish — suits most plates, because it shows height and depth the way a seated diner sees them. Straight top-down works for flat food: pizza, bowls, spreads. Straight-on at table level is for tall builds like burgers and layered desserts. Pick one angle per menu section and stick to it; the consistency looks more professional than any single hero shot.

Question 9

Why do my food photos come out yellow?

Accepted Answer

Restaurant bulbs. Most dining rooms run warm tungsten light around 2700K, and phone cameras only partly correct for it — so rice turns yellow, white plates go cream, greens drift toward olive. Shoot near a window in daylight when you can. When you can't, the cast is fixable afterwards; colour correction is one of the main things PlateRefresh does on every photo.

Question 10

Should I use flash for food photos?

Accepted Answer

No. A phone flash is a small, hard light firing straight at the plate — it flattens texture, throws a harsh shadow behind the dish, and puts hot glare on anything wet or glazed. Soft window light beats it every time. If the room is genuinely too dark, carry the plate somewhere brighter; nobody will ever know the pasta was photographed by the front window.

Question 11

Why does food look worse in photos than in real life?

Accepted Answer

Your eyes handle a far wider range of light than a phone sensor. Standing at the pass, you see the sheen on the sauce and the detail inside a dark bowl at the same time; the camera has to choose one, so highlights burn out or shadows turn to mud, and colour drifts with the room lighting. The dish is fine. The exposure isn't — which is why fixing the light fixes the photo.

Question 12

How do restaurants get that glossy professional look in food photos?

Accepted Answer

Light, mostly. A pro shoot uses one big soft light source, a touch of glow from behind the dish so it reads fresh, and an exposure that keeps sheen on the sauces without burning them white. Add a plate straight from the kitchen — not one that sat twenty minutes — and honest styling like a brush of oil or a crack of pepper. That's the whole recipe. Good food photography involves less trickery than people assume.

Question 13

Do I need props, boards and backgrounds?

Accepted Answer

You already own the best ones. The plates and tables your customers actually eat off make the menu look like your restaurant instead of a stock library. What matters more than any prop is consistency — same surfaces, same light, same angle across the whole menu. Brand kits exist for exactly this: photograph your real plateware once, and every generated shot uses it.

Question 14

Do I need any equipment at all?

Accepted Answer

A phone. That's the list. No ring light, no lightbox, no reflector boards, no editing apps. A phone from the last five or so years captures more than enough detail — the missing ingredient in phone photos is studio lighting, and that gets added after the fact.

Question 15

Is AI-enhanced food photography allowed on Wolt, Uber Eats and Deliveroo?

Accepted Answer

Yes — what platforms prohibit is photos that misrepresent the dish, and PlateRefresh is built specifically to avoid that. A real photo of your real burger with studio lighting applied is the same thing every restaurant with a professional photographer has done for decades, just faster. We never add ingredients, change portions, or swap the dish.

Question 16

What are the photo requirements on Wolt, Bolt Food, Uber Eats and Glovo?

Accepted Answer

Details vary by platform, but they all want the same things: a sharp, well-lit photo of the actual item, landscape or square, at least around 1,200 pixels wide, with the food filling most of the frame on a clean background. All of them reject watermarks, logos, collages, and photos with people in them. Exact pixel specs shift often enough that the merchant guides are worth checking — but a clean, high-resolution shot passes everywhere.

Question 17

Why was my photo rejected by a delivery app?

Accepted Answer

The usual offenders, in order: a watermark or logo on the image, blur, a photo too dark to read, a collage or border, the item not filling the frame, or the photo showing something other than what's sold. Platforms also bounce obvious stock photos. A sharp, straightforward shot of the real dish on a clean surface almost never gets refused.

Question 18

Do photos affect where my restaurant ranks in delivery apps?

Accepted Answer

Indirectly, but powerfully. The apps rank partly on conversion — how many people who see your listing go on to order — and tiles with appetising photos convert far better than grey placeholders. Complete, recently updated listings also score better than half-filled ones. A fully photographed menu lifts you twice: more taps per impression, and better placement because of those taps.

Question 19

Should I add food photos to my Google Business Profile?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and most restaurants under-use it. Google has long reported that businesses with photos get significantly more direction requests and website clicks, and food photos are exactly what people scroll through when choosing where to eat. Upload your best plates, refresh a few every month, and make sure the first photos are dishes — not the sign, not the empty dining room.

Question 20

Can I use the same photos on delivery apps, my website and the printed menu?

Accepted Answer

If you own the rights, yes — and that's worth checking. Photographer contracts often license images for specific uses, so shots you paid to put on Wolt may not be cleared for a billboard. Everything made with PlateRefresh carries a full commercial license: menus, apps, ads, print, social, forever. For print, take the 4K download — 2K is plenty for screens, but big print wants the extra resolution.

Question 21

Will customers be able to tell the photo was made with AI?

Accepted Answer

No, because the food in the photo is your food. PlateRefresh doesn't generate a dish from a text prompt — it takes the photo you shot and rebuilds the lighting, color, and background around the exact plate you cooked. What changes is what a $2,000 studio day would change: light, contrast, surface, mood.

Question 22

What exactly gets changed in my photo — and what's never touched?

Accepted Answer

Changed: lighting, exposure, colour balance, contrast, the surface and background around the plate. Never touched: the food itself. Same ingredients, same garnish, same portion, same plating, same angle. The rule is simple — a customer holding the plate next to the photo should see the same dish — and it's enforced in the pipeline, not just promised on this page.

Question 23

How is this different from asking ChatGPT or Midjourney for a food photo?

Accepted Answer

Midjourney invents a dish; we relight yours. Your photo goes in first, and the model is constrained to preserve the dish — lifting its textures, never reinventing it — while improving everything around it. Plus the practical stuff a chatbot won't do: locked brand plates across your menu, batch processing of 50 photos, delivery-platform crop ratios, and automatic refunds for failed shots.

Question 24

My phone photos are honestly pretty bad. Will this still work?

Accepted Answer

Probably. The minimum we need: the dish in focus, reasonably lit, and fully in frame. From there the pipeline handles flat colors, ugly backgrounds, and harsh shadows. What we can't fix: motion blur, a half-eaten dish, or photos so dark there's no detail. If a generation fails, the credit goes back automatically.

Question 25

Can it fix blurry photos?

Accepted Answer

No, and be suspicious of anything that claims it can. A blurred photo is missing information, and "recovering" it means inventing detail — the opposite of what a menu photo should do. The same goes for a half-eaten dish or a frame so dark there's nothing left in the shadows. Retake those. Dull light, yellow cast, cluttered background, flat contrast: all fair game.

Question 26

What are brand kits, and why would I need one?

Accepted Answer

A brand kit locks your actual plates, tabletops and surfaces so every photo across your menu looks shot in the same restaurant. Upload photos of the ceramics and tables you really serve on, and every generated shot uses those exact props. Even the $9.99 Test Mode includes 1 brand kit; most single-location restaurants need exactly one.

Question 27

Can I do the whole menu in one go?

Accepted Answer

Yes — upload up to 50 photos in one batch and they run through the pipeline together, so a full menu takes a coffee break rather than an afternoon. Each dish is still handled individually, and you get an email when the batch is done. Most batches come back within about ten minutes.

Question 28

What happens if a photo comes out wrong?

Accepted Answer

When a generation fails outright, the credit comes back automatically. When the result just isn't right, run it again with different settings. The honest expectation: most dishes look right on the first or second try. Test Mode exists so you can confirm that on your own food for $9.99 before putting a whole menu through.

Question 29

Who owns the finished photos?

Accepted Answer

You do, permanently. Every paid plan — Test Mode included — comes with a full commercial license covering menus, delivery platforms, advertising, social and print. Cancel whenever you like; the photos you've already made stay yours to download and keep.

Question 30

What happens to the photos I upload?

Accepted Answer

They're stored encrypted, used only to produce your finished shots, and never used to train AI models. PlateRefresh is an EU company and takes GDPR seriously: you can export everything or request full deletion at any time. Nothing you upload feeds anyone's training data.

Question 31

Is it legal to use AI-enhanced photos in menus and ads?

Accepted Answer

Yes, under the same rule that has always governed food advertising: the photo must honestly represent what's served. Adjusting light and colour is standard practice — every professionally shot menu photo you've ever seen was edited. PlateRefresh also embeds the machine-readable AI disclosure the EU AI Act calls for into each file's metadata, so that box is ticked without a visible watermark.

Phone snap,studio piece.

Studio results, none of the studio.

Restaurants & cafés

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Creators & social

Three steps. Phone photo in, menu-ready hero out.

Snap or upload

Pick your brand

Download & post

Your phone can't see what you see.

Highlights, recovered

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Colour, true to the plate

Fresh photos are how you stay seen.

Climb the delivery ranking

Feed the feed, daily

Look open, busy, worth it

AI relights every shot in seconds.Then a photographer finishes it by hand.

Real shots, real restaurants.

No tricks. Just your food, better.

Your real dish — never faked

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One price. Every plate, every shift.

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A fraction of a shoot

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Licensing, privacy, and the fine print

Your food already looksgood in person.

Phone snap,
studio piece.

AI relights every shot in seconds.
Then a photographer finishes it by hand.

Your food already looks
good in person.