Our menu photos were phone snaps under fluorescent light. They were costing us orders and we knew it.
I described each dish to Quodara — the plate, the garnish, the surface, the light I wanted — and asked for overhead shots on a dark walnut table with soft window light from the left. What came back looks like the cover of a cookbook. Steam reads as steam. The sauce has the right viscosity. The herbs are not plastic.
The detail that sold me was the soft-boiled egg. Getting the yolk to look genuinely liquid at the cut edge is the hardest thing to fake, and it is exactly where cheap food imagery collapses.
Twelve dishes, one chat, one consistent lighting setup across all of them — and that consistency is the part a real shoot charges you a full day for.
Orders through the delivery app are up. I am not going to pretend I ran a controlled experiment, but the photos are the only thing that changed.
Prompt is below. Swap the dish description and keep the lighting and surface lines identical so the whole set stays consistent.