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“When I first started [blogging], phone cameras were terrible. You had to carry a DSLR camera everywhere, even if you just wanted a basic picture,” says Ed Tan, a London-based food creator. “Posting live wasn’t really a thing because you would have to constantly download photos off your camera and on to your phone. Obviously phones have changed a lot since then.”

A lot has changed for Tan, too. When he launched his Instagram account @onehungryasian back in 2014, he was still working in finance; Instagram was a creative outlet, a visually led snapshot of his life. “It was very much just my love and passion for eating out and trying new cuisine and dishes all across London,” he says.

Fast-forward 12 years and Tan has amassed some 40,000 followers, all hungry for his take on restaurants across the capital and beyond. But he insists that it’s still a hobby. “As a side hustle, I get to enjoy it a lot more,” he says. “I can visit the places I really want to and try what I fancy, without having to always follow what’s trending and whatever the latest hype is.”

What challenges do food creators face when photographing in restaurants?
To keep his followers engaged, Tan will post new content on his account several times a week, mixing videos with photos of restaurants he’s been to and the dishes he’s tried. Everything from the plump oysters on a half shell to the smoky barbecue on a hot grill is captured on his phone these days. The only extra bit of kit he carries is an LED light panel – because lighting is a perennial problem when you’re photographing food in a restaurant setting.

“You go into a dimly lit restaurant – which is beautiful to sit in – and you have a really nice dinner, but it’s the worst setting for taking photos of food,” he says. “It always comes out grainy; you can’t tell what the food is, and it doesn’t always look very appealing.” The perfect light conditions, according to Tan, are when you have a slightly overcast day – but that’s not always feasible. Nor is it always appropriate to switch on the LED light in a fancy restaurant, which makes getting great photos for content tricky.

Logistics pose another problem. For one, you have to be quick. There isn’t always time to stage the dish for the perfect shot, and sometimes the food gets served before you’ve even had a chance to get your phone out. There are also dishes that only photograph well when they’re piping hot. Tan uses pizza as an example. “Once you let it cool down, the cheese solidifies – you can instinctively tell when it’s a cold shot versus a hot one, so you have to move really quickly.”

There are plenty of other things that might upset the balance of your photo. A pillar in an otherwise perfect interior shot, for example. Or cutlery and plates that don’t complement the food. And then there are things such as other guests in the background or unintended product placement that break the illusion of an otherwise slick deck. All of these flaws add up, according to Tan, and sometimes you don’t realise until hours after you’ve taken the shot and eaten your dish.

How AI smartphone cameras improve low-light food photography
This is where the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra comes in. A brand-new smartphone with AI-powered photo tools that makes it easy to capture images in low-light conditions, and even easier to edit out unwanted objects afterwards. Instead of manually editing an image, you simply type or dictate a description of what you want changed using the Photo Assist¹ feature and the phone will do it for you. You could remove an unsightly stain from a table cloth, for example, or change the colours in the background.

Can AI editing enhance photos without making them look inauthentic?
Tan, who had used a different brand for years, needed some convincing. “At first I was kind of like, ‘Well, how is AI supposed to help me take photos?’ And I think this is one of the big questions I had about any AI-powered shots,” he says. “As food creators we’re meant to go and take authentic, great pictures of the food. It’s got to be the same dish that other people get, otherwise you get accused of being fake or inauthentic. So I was very interested to see how the phone’s AI capability could help elevate my photos, without looking fake.”

How Samsung’s Photo Assist¹ improves restaurant photography
It turned out to be a gamechanger. Aside from the myriad preset features designed to help you capture the perfect shot in a range of settings, and Samsung’s 10x Optical Quality Zoom feature, which makes photographing things from a distance effortless – it’s the editing capabilities of Photo Assist¹ that impressed Tan the most.

“I can get it to retouch a photo in two seconds, whereas normally I’d have to sit there for a good couple of minutes per photo,” he says. “The most amazing part was when I asked the AI system to touch up a photo so it looks like it was taken in broad daylight rather than in a dim restaurant. The results were really, really impressive. It was not a forced representation of the food; if I happened to go at lunch instead of dinner, I would have got exactly the same image.”

He adds: “It’s already surpassed my expectations [as a creator].”

Buy the Galaxy S26 Ultra now

^{1. Requires network connection and Samsung account login. A visible watermark is overlaid on the saved image to indicate it was generated by Galaxy AI. Accuracy of output not guaranteed.}