With food photos in ads and videos, some secrets are already out. What looks like ice-cream is often raw dough (so it doesn’t melt under hot lights). Cereal bowls are filled with glue, not milk, so the corn flakes stay crisp. Shaving cream is substituted for whipped cream, the maple syrup on those pancakes is actually petrol. With new items on menus comes a new bag of tricks. Three food photographers and stylists: Goa-based Aishwarya Rivonker, Gurgaon-based Abhishek Khanna and Chennai-based Ashwin Vijayaraghavan, offer lessons on making real food pop on the ‘gram.

Full steam ahead. Korean pull-apart bread, dim sum and sushi are each challenging in their own way. Adding drama helps. Photograph the bread when it’s fresh from the oven, or include the fingers that are tearing it open, recommends Rivonker. No steam for dim sum? No problem. “Stylists create artificial steam either by re-heating the steamer, using dry ice, or even with incense sticks.”

Just dough it. A well-known trick is to brush a little oil over leafy vegetables (or even sushi, these days) to give it a little bit of shine. “My most-used trick to make ingredients stand in place is to secure them with clay or dough balls,” says Rivonker. Dough is versatile. “When plating curries and meat, we place dough inside the bowl for the base so that the veggies or meat can be seen on top of the curry instead of sinking into the bowl,” Khanna says.

Let there be light. Khanna and Vijayaraghavan advise keeping the food next to a natural light source. A sunlit window is best. “Side lighting is a good way to start; front lighting kills the depth, back lighting is tricky as you may end up adding shadows to the front. And avoid shooting under multiple sources of light, it makes the colours look unnatural”, says Khanna.

All the sprinkles. Take the extra time to chop some coriander, make tadka, or drizzle cream on top of the dal. Or just be more mindful of the crockery and cutlery in a picture, say stylists. “You want accessories that make the food stand out, not items that look pretty on their own,” says Vijayaraghavan. Rivonker recommends “adding a full spoon of golden desi ghee or a jar of homemade pickle next to a dish” to add colour and complexity.

Hack job. Of course, every photographer has a secret trick. “When shooting biryani, I use a tweezer to spread the rice out equally in all directions,” says Khanna, who also relies on a perfect top shot for foods that lack depth or height (a pizza, perhaps). “Adding salt to flat beer will make the foam reappear for about 15 minutes,” says Rivonker. Often, she just uses dishwashing liquid to mimic foam. “Once, I was out of black coffee for a shoot, so I tried this trick I saw online: Dilute soy sauce with a little water to make a lookalike. It worked.” Thank us later!

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