Cockpitby Elegant Elephants
Build your Cockpit
Built for hospitality

Your dish.
Your property.
One photograph better.

Send a real photograph of a real plate, choose the setting you want it to sit in, and get back renders that look like your property took them. The food itself never changes.

Start AI Food Dishes · £750See how it works

Setup price shown. then £150/month keeps it running.

£750 to set upYou choose the final imageNothing is published for you

01

Pick a dish.
Watch it change room.

The walkthrough

Two minutes, start to finish.

Watch AI Food Dishes run once, end to end — the job going in, the work coming back, and the moment you approve it.

The whole workflow

From kitchen photo to chosen image in four steps.

No studio to book. No shoot day to schedule. You give it a dish and a room, and it gives you options to choose between.

  1. Pick a photograph of a dish you actually serve — a phone shot at the pass is enough to start.

  2. Choose the setting you want the dish to inhabit, then render it in your property’s light and surfaces.

  3. Look at the options side by side. They are variations of styling, never variations of the food.

  4. Select the render that feels true to the property. Nothing leaves until you say so.

Live state

The product changes
with each step.

House model / live10 options ready
Your photo
Property setting
Both chosen — ready
Wild mushroom tart · Dining room
Option 01 selected

Nothing is downloaded, distributed or published here. Renders restyle the plate you actually serve — no ingredient is added or removed.

10 render options ready
The setting is the product

Same dish.
Four unmistakably
different properties.

Constant inputWild mushroom tart
“One phone photograph, taken at the pass at 19:42 under service lighting. A crimped pastry edge, three field mushrooms, a smear of thyme cream, a thumbprint of jus on the plate rim. Every render below starts from this exact plate.”
Country-house hotelLow afternoon light, aged oak, unhurried

Scrubbed oak refectory table, grain running out of frame. Single low window light from the left at three o’clock in November, long soft shadow falling right, a stop under. Linen napkin in oatmeal, an antique silver fork laid at an angle, a half-glass of red just out of focus behind. Palette of tobacco, moss and worn pewter. Three-quarter crop, generous negative space above for a menu headline.

Country-house still life

Same tart. Same crimp. Same three mushrooms. Four photographic worlds, and nothing on the plate moved.

What you are buying

Built once.Ready every timea plate leaves the pass.

A rendering setup shaped around your actual food and your actual rooms — not a filter and not a stock library.

£750 setupthen £150/month
  • 01

    A House Model built from your dishes, rooms, surfaces and light

  • 02

    A working photo-to-render workflow you can run from a phone

  • 03

    Setting profiles for your pass, dining room, bar, terrace and rooms

  • 04

    The ingredient integrity rule enforced on every render

  • 05

    Setup, first dish set, and handover

  • 06

    Ongoing upkeep as menus, seasons and rooms change

£750 setup, then £150 per month. Six-month minimum term, then month to month. Every image already produced for you is yours to keep and use. So is your House Model — the written record of your dishes, your rooms, your light and your styling rules. What stops is new rendering.

How it starts
  1. 1

    Pay £750 setup, 50% now and 50% on delivery

  2. 2

    Send dish photographs and a few images of your rooms

  3. 3

    We build your House Model and setting profiles

  4. 4

    Review the first renders and request refinements

  5. 5

    £150/month begins once you are live

Trust is won on the hard ones

A guest orders what they see. That is the whole constraint.

The easy work is making food look good. The real test is what happens when looking good and telling the truth pull in opposite directions.

01Accuracy under pressure
Head chefCountry-house hotel · Sunday lunch menu
“The fish and chips render looks thin. Can you thicken the batter, pile the chips higher, and put a proper wedge of lemon on there? It just needs to sell better on the menu board.”
In your voice · accountable

We will not do that, and here is why. The batter thickness, the number of chips and the lemon are all things a guest will count when the plate arrives. Change any of them and the render stops being a photograph of your dish and becomes a promise you cannot keep at the pass. What we will do is rebuild the photograph around the food you actually serve: hard raking light so the batter’s ridges read as texture, a plate that fills more of the frame, a lower camera so the portion has height, and a warmer surface so the fry colour lifts. If you genuinely want more chips in the photograph, plate more chips and send us a new picture — then it is true and we will render it immediately.

The integrity rule
  • Ingredients preserved
  • Portion honest
  • Styling only
  • Owner selects
02The dish that photographs badly
OwnerCity restaurant · autumn menu
“The braised oxtail is the best thing we cook and it photographs like mud. Every picture we take is a brown pile. Can you just make it look like something else?”
In your voice · accountable

No — but a brown dish photographed badly and a brown dish photographed well are very different pictures, and we can get you the second one. Braises are a lighting problem, not a food problem. We render it low key against a dark oiled surface so the sauce reads as gloss rather than sludge, put a hard back light across the top so the sheen picks out the shred of the meat, drop the exposure so the one bright highlight is the sauce breaking over the edge, and crop close enough that texture becomes the subject. It will still look like braised oxtail, because it is. If after the renders you still think the dish will not sell on a photograph, that is useful information — some dishes sell in words instead, and we would rather tell you that than dress the plate up as something it is not.

The integrity rule
  • Ingredients preserved
  • Portion honest
  • Styling only
  • Owner selects
03Allergen and ingredient integrity
Kitchen managerSeaside B&B · dessert listing
“The posset looks bare. Scatter some crushed pistachio over the top and maybe a few raspberries — we don’t serve it that way but it would look far better in the photo.”
In your voice · accountable

This is the one thing the product will never do. A visible ingredient in a photograph is read by a guest as an ingredient on the plate, and pistachio is a declarable nut allergen. A render that adds it would put an allergen on your listing that is not on your menu, and would leave you defending a picture you cannot serve. The rule runs both ways: we do not add a visible ingredient and we do not remove one either, so nothing gets quietly edited out of frame. The bareness is a styling problem and we will solve it as one — a smaller plate so the posset fills it, a shallow angle so the surface catches the light, cold pale surroundings so the cream reads as rich, and space in the frame instead of clutter. If you want pistachio in the picture, put pistachio on the dessert, tell us it is there, and photograph it.

The integrity rule
  • Ingredients preserved
  • Portion honest
  • Styling only
  • Owner selects

Every one of these renders was chosen by the owner before it went anywhere. That is the point — it restyles the photograph, you keep the judgment, and the guest gets the plate they were shown.

The practical difference
4hour half-day,
then days of edits<5minutes
for the next dish

The same plate, without the shoot day.

Take one dish through a traditional shoot. A food photographer’s half-day in the UK commonly runs £400 to £700, covers roughly four hours on site, and returns edited files three to five working days later. Cover six dishes in that half-day and you are at £67 to £117 a plate, paid before you have seen a frame. Here, setup is £750 once and £150 a month after that, and the next dish is a phone photograph and a few minutes. The shoot day is worth booking when you need people, rooms and movement. It is harder to justify for the eleventh plate on an autumn menu that changes again in March.

An illustrative comparison built on representative published rates, not a measured client result. Your quotes, your menu size and your week will differ.

0

ingredients added or removedNo render adds a visible ingredient, removes one, or inflates a portion. A guest orders what they see.

One model. Every plate.

Stop apologising for your food photographs.

One build, and every dish after it arrives looking like your property took the picture — with the plate exactly as your kitchen sends it.

House Model£750

to set up · then £150/month

  • A House Model built from your dishes, rooms, surfaces and light
  • A working photo-to-render workflow you can run from a phone
  • Setting profiles for your pass, dining room, bar, terrace and rooms
  • The ingredient integrity rule enforced on every render

Six-month minimum term, then month to month.

Setup invoiced 50% before work and 50% on delivery. Monthly billed in advance. GBP, excluding VAT.

Every image already produced for you is yours to keep and use. So is your House Model — the written record of your dishes, your rooms, your light and your styling rules. What stops is new rendering.

What happens next
  1. 01

    Pay £750 setup, 50% now and 50% on delivery

  2. 02

    Send dish photographs and a few images of your rooms

  3. 03

    We build your House Model and setting profiles

  4. 04

    Review the first renders and request refinements

  5. 05

    £150/month begins once you are live

Start AI Food Dishes · £750

Building more than one product? Add this to your Cockpit and price the whole shape in one place.

You select the final image; nothing is published for you.
No render adds or removes a visible ingredient.

The price above is the one-time setup. then £150/month, billed in advance.

The honest answers

Everything worth asking before you buy.

Partly, and here is exactly how. You pay £750 once to build your House Model and setting profiles, then £150 a month to keep it maintained as menus, seasons and rooms change. Six-month minimum term, then month to month. Every image already produced, and the House Model itself, are yours either way.

No, and this is the rule the whole product is built on. A render never adds a visible ingredient, never removes one, and never inflates a portion. It changes the surface, the light, the props, the palette and the crop — the photograph, not the plate. If you want more on the dish, plate more and send a new photograph. A guest has to be able to order what they see.

Yes. Every image you select is yours outright, for menus, print, your website, listings, socials or anything else, with no separate licence and no expiry. If you stop paying, the images you already have stay yours.

Yes, and the integrity rule is what makes that safe. Delivery listings are where inaccurate photography causes the most complaints, because the guest compares the picture to the box in front of them. Since the render cannot change the food, what arrives matches what was shown. Check each platform’s own image specifications for size and framing.

No. A phone photograph taken at the pass is enough, and that is what most kitchens send. It needs to be in focus, show the whole plate, and be a dish you actually serve. Poor service lighting and an unflattering angle are exactly what the render fixes.

No. Nothing is downloaded, distributed or published automatically. The renders are options on a screen until you select one, and where it goes after that is entirely your decision.

After the six-month minimum term, yes. Tell us before your next billing date and we pause the monthly upkeep and new rendering. Your House Model is kept intact so you can restart without rebuilding it, and your existing images are unaffected.

You keep every image already produced and the House Model itself — the documented record of your dishes, rooms, light and styling rules. What stops is new rendering and our ongoing upkeep.

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