In defence of the imperfect stem

Open almost any floral stock search and you will see the same plant a hundred times: symmetrical, unblemished, evenly lit, every petal intact. It is a strange thing to look at, because it is a plant that has never existed.

Why the retouching instinct is usually wrong

The reasoning behind it is sound enough. A blemish reads as a defect, a defect reads as carelessness, and nobody wants carelessness on their packaging. So the brown edge goes, the nibbled petal is rebuilt, the stem is straightened.

The trouble is that a viewer's sense of whether they are looking at a photograph or an illustration is built almost entirely from small irregularities. Remove them all and the eye stops treating the image as evidence of a real thing. It becomes decoration. That is fine if decoration is what you wanted, and quietly fatal if you were trying to say something about authenticity, provenance or growing.

The brands that sell on the basis of a real farm, a real season or a real ingredient are precisely the ones whose art direction most often destroys the impression of realness in post-production.

What to keep

Asymmetry. A flower head that is not perfectly radial. Petals of slightly different lengths. This is free credibility.

Edge history. A little browning at the tip of an older petal tells the viewer the plant was picked rather than manufactured.

Insect evidence, in moderation. A small chewed notch reads as a garden. A leaf that is half gone reads as neglect. The line is roughly where a customer would start to feel sorry for the plant.

Real light. Uneven light across a petal is what gives it thickness. Flattening it out to a smooth gradient removes the one cue that says this object has volume.

What to remove

Dust and studio debris, because they belong to the room rather than the plant. Sensor spots. A hair across the frame. Anything a viewer would read as a mistake by the photographer rather than a fact about the flower.

The test is simple: does this detail tell me about the plant, or about the process of photographing it? Keep the first, remove the second.

Where this leaves the catalogue

We do not silently clean everything. Frames here have brown edges, insect notches and stems that lean. The specification note on each page tells you what is there, and the licence lets you retouch anything you want to.

But the file arrives with the plant's own history intact, and putting it back afterwards is not possible.