The procedure

Creating a “Daily Food-Square” image is about 4 steps detailed below:

1 – take a photo about your food
2 – eat your food
3 – process your food photos (digitally)
4 – publish your Daily Food-Square image on the web

Here are the more detailed instructions:

1 –  Let’s take a picture of every food you eat and drink (all of them) (and don’t forget even a piece of nut or rubber-gum!) You may use flash light, when you shoot photos about your meal. It will ensure, that all of your food images will look unified, and without any shadows on them. When you put all the food images together, it may give an impression of consequent, sharp, proper image. You may put a white/green paper or any other one-colored flat surface under +/ behind your meal when you take the photo. (to ensure a homogeneous, solid background,  (it’s important, later you will see..)

2 – Eat your food as you always used to

3 – Process your food photos digitally (check the image above)

3.1 – At the end of the day, transfer all the food and drink pictures – you took during the day – to your computer. (i used to do this at the beginning of the very next day, so to be sure, that  the captured day is over (midnight passed successfully;)

3.2 – Open Photoshop (or other similar image editor software)

3.3 – Create an empty image – sized 3000 x 3000 pixels (300dpi) – with white background

3.4 – Open the first meal image, and cut around the food or drink on it precisely (i used to do this at a zoom-rate  ~200%  ) You may use “magic wand”. If you used solid background behind the meal, it may take only a few clicks, if not, you will cut the image out for several minutes.

3.5 – Repeat the 3.4 step until you cut out all your meal photos (for that day)

3.6 – Drag and drop all the meal images onto the 3000 x 3000 pixel empty image.

3.7 – Scale the meal images until they are relatively correct sized compared to each other. (You can / have to note the size of the specific meals, during you take photo and eat them.)

3.8 – Adjust the brightness, contrast, levels, shadow, highlights, saturation, sharpness etc. of your meal images until they start to look like they looked like in real. (images may seem such dark, colorless, shadowed, etc., so than you have to “re-fine” them.)

3.9 – Write the date, your name (and/or other optional attributes like logo, notes, etc.) on your finished “Daily Food-Square” image and save it

Here is an example movie of this 3rd step:

4 – Publish your Daily Food-Square image on the web. (And let me and others know about that! %)

It takes about 50 minutes per day for me (iwanwilaga) to do this procedure detailed above. Sometimes it may take less or more. For example, when i fasted, and only drunk water for a day, it took about 10 minutes to finish and publish that Daily Food-Square image. When i took apart in a huge feast, it took about 2 hours to finish with the digital processing.
Using proper background may save you a lot of time, may save dozens of minutes per day.

If you are interested in this project, you can get more info at  Thank You For My Daily Food page.