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Subcategory Page - Cooking

Mouthwatering Cooking Stock Photos

While cooking food provides us with sustenance, it can also bring joy and passion. Shutterstock has a library of high-quality cooking stock images submitted by contributors around the world. From cookbooks to recipe websites, we have the cooking images you’re looking for. Whether you want an image of home cooking, couples cooking, family cooking, or kids cooking, Shutterstock has you covered.

The ingredients in cooking stock images

Cooking is something that is passed down from generation to generation, keeping culture alive through food. While not everyone may be a professional chef in the kitchen, cooking is essential to everyday life and shared with family, friends, and partners. While Shutterstock has a varied selection of cooking stock images, many of them portray families cooking together. Other images include chefs in professional kitchens, colorful ingredients, as well as illustrations of cooking utensils and people cooking.

Trending cooking images and backgrounds

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Questions about cooking images and backgrounds


What are cooking images?

Cooking images portray people in the kitchen making food with the use of a stove or any other kitchen appliance. Of course, people can also cook outdoors over an open fire, on a charcoal grill, or pit. Because cooking brings us together, cooking images often use families or partners as subjects to emphasize how important cooking can be for creating strong relationships with one another. Cooking images usually have one or more people using kitchen utensils to prepare food, or they can be close-up images of ingredients or prepared dishes. Food in cooking images is almost perfect-looking, with bright, colorful ingredients that look good enough to almost touch.


What makes cooking images appetizing?

When it comes to cooking images, they can’t rely on smell, touch, or taste to let the viewer know how delicious the food is. Instead, cooking images have to use different elements to make food appear appetizing to viewers. One of the best ways to do that is by making all ingredients look as fresh and colorful as possible. Fruits and vegetables with bright colors that pop off the screen are popular. The fresher the ingredients look, the more appetizing they will appear to viewers. Other ways to make cooking images more appetizing include showing the ingredients being cooked on a pan. The image of food being cooked serves as a visual aid that may bring up memories of certain foods to viewers’ minds. Using visual elements like steam, smoke, and condensation are other ways to make cooking images more appetizing, as well as seasoning or saucing a dish.


Why are cooking images with people more engaging?

While cooking can be a solo endeavor, cooking with others is much more fun. When cooking with others, it’s a time to learn a recipe or teach one. Whether it’s a typical weekday meal or Thanksgiving dinner, anyone can jump in the kitchen and help. From peeling potatoes to dicing onions to searing a steak, everyone can contribute. While cooking can be seen as a chore, it can also be a communal exercise, where teamwork and communication are the currency and the meal the reward. Using people in cooking images brings up those feelings of teamwork and family, and it reminds viewers of their experiences in the kitchen. It just makes sense to have people in the images, as people interact with utensils, appliances, and ingredients to prepare food. Without people, you can’t show a knife cutting, a pan-searing, or a blender blending.


How can I find high quality cooking images?

Whether you want an image of a chef cooking or a vector graphic of a cooking logo, Shutterstock is the right place to find whatever you’re looking for. The simplest way to search for something is by typing the term in the search bar, which populates the page with relevant, high-quality images of the term you just typed. Right above the first row of images, Shutterstock places clickable text bubbles with related terms that are generated based on the term. These suggestions can help you narrow down your search. If you simply search for “cooking,” Shutterstock may suggest “cast iron utensils” or “man cooking.” If you’d like to customize your search results, Shutterstock also provides several filters on the left-hand side of the search page. You can select whether you want people or not, show photos only, and even choose a specific color. For example, searching for “cooking” and selecting the green color filter brings up images of fresh vegetables and produce.


What are the most popular cooking images?

Shutterstock’s vast library of stock images has many different types of cooking photos. Finding the right cooking image depends mainly on the project and the tone and messaging of said project. However, there are cooking images that are popular in a general sense and which can fit in a variety of digital, print, and social projects. Cooking backgrounds are very popular because companies can use the backgrounds to place their products. The background could also be used to add people. Cooking images with people are also popular, with family cooking and chef cooking images being some of the most popular. Apart from photos, vectors and illustrations of cooking logos and cooking icons are also popular on Shutterstock. Icons and logos can be used in websites, recipe books, social media images, and other cooking projects.

Browse cooking images

Using cooking images on specialty websites

  • There is a whole industry of highly-specialized cooking content on TV networks, social media, and especially cooking websites. With the internet making it possible for just about anyone to reach an audience, cooking blogs are extremely popular in the foodie crowd.

  • From home cooks to chefs, anyone can start a cooking blog, and there is a big audience out there that is hungry for recipes. Cooking stock images fit in perfectly with cooking blogs. Bloggers can use cooking background images to digitally insert their dishes into, or they can place themselves cooking in the background.

  • Recipe websites and websites that sell niche cooking utensils and products can also use stock images to enhance their product images. Cooking icons and logos, which have eye-catching and unique designs, can be used on recipe websites to delineate certain sections or to simply add a visual aid.

Using cooking images on specialty websites

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