The whole pic is a fake since all the blooms are manipulated copies

Unfortunately, this is here and its not going to way..

for many reasons, vendors think they have to make thier pics look unreliastic and glorious to sell it. There is a daylily hybridizer that drastically does this.. makes all of thier lillies have a very unnatural glow.. yet when I see actual garden pics they are just as natually lovely. I dont understand it, but its done, its done alot.

Silverkelt

Before Photoshop and even before computers, catalog pix were "enhanced" in color. I'm surprised you are surprised.

Carol

Yes, but the point is it's dishonest and manipulative. The enhanced colors were too, and perhaps were easier to spot; and in any case colors are hard to reproduce accurately. This is a further step in the wrong direction.
Melissa

And they airbrush the models who sell you makeup too. What else is new?

And the whole point of advertising, last time I checked, was for it to be "manipulative," right?

Good grief. I have to agree with those above who don't quite understand the cries of indignation. The question begged here is, 'So, what else is new?' Retailers learned long ago to dispense with reality and to market solely to our dream of the ideal.

My roses aren't as 'bloomiferous' as J&P's; my culinary creations never actually look like the pictures in Gourmet Magazine; and you know how spectacular that lovely frock looked on the model in the Talbot's catalog? Well, you outta see it on me . . .

These deceptions help to keep the dream alive, and -- perversely or not -- by selling the dream, they're a boon to the economy. We all want to help the economy these days, right?

Kstrong and Jax the difference is that you are not buying the airbrushed model in fashion magazine you're buying the outfit.

This sort of lying is likely to drive people away from roses. They see the catalog pic with these full perfect blooms and then look at their reality and figure something is wrong and roses are too hard to grow.

While there is a long tradition in garden catalogs of exaggerating size and color, it doesn't make it right. Photoshopping in more blooms is deceitful.

You'd think they'd have done it better. A pretty crude job.
Anita

Anita, that's what struck me, too.
That is a TERRIBLY sloppy job of "enhancement."

I spent most of my working life in advertising, so in that sort of realm, not much surprises me.
That's why I rarely even glance at garden catalogs.

And, HEY! Does anyone else remember when the whipped cream
on a "lemon pie" was shaving cream, for advertising photos?

Jeri (Retired Advertising hack)

kandm,

I totally know what you mean. I was really interested in the grandiflora 'Sweetness' (a lavender rose), and realized later that the magical color they showed it in had to be photo adjusted. There is also some other catalog that goes out in spring and they tried to edit a 'Blue Girl' to look truly blue, which is nonsense because I've grown several of them and seen pix of other's plants.

As always, buyer beware.

Jaxindel,
Your point apparently wafted right over the head of whoever it was above who objected to your comment, but you're absolutely right. It's the illusion that sells.

All, or at least most, of us here fancy ourselves to be members of the rose cognoscenti. J&P has no interest in trying to dupe us -- they're marketing to the hundreds of thousands of backyard rose growers who have no interest whatsoever in the rose minutia that we bandy about here.

Seems that every year someone simply MUST remind us (one more time again) that J+P fudges its photos. Yawn . . .

Minutiae maybe? :-)

Well, I'll come back and pound the point a little longer. Advertising isn't always and necessarily manipulative. It can be informative: This is what I have; if you want it it's available. Also there exists a legal and moral principal of truth in advertising, and this example arouses the indignation of some of us because it's mighty close to the line, and I'm not sure on which side.
I have a concept of advertising how it could be--useful--and not how it so often is--tending to the profit of the advertiser and the damage, as promoting wasteful consumption, of the buyer.
Melissa
P.S. I know I've wandered well away from roses, and will stop here.

all advertising does is sell a dream - an aspiration of 'the good life' - as consumers we really ought to be sceptical of these unrealistic claims but there are moral issues here especially when children or young people are targeted. Any parent knows the misery of dealing with dissapointed offspring who do not have the emotional distance to separate reality from the lurid, photoshopped, inflated claims. We are being sold a lifestyle and our deepest fears of exclusion are cynically manipulated. Even so, advertisers are NOT omnipotent. We can all see for ourselves that advertisers (indeed most of the print media) is guilty of bigging up the product). I do understand why people often feel so dissapointed that THEIR garden can never look like one out of a magazine - which is simply showing a moment, a framed image which only exists for a second when the sun is in the right place, the plants are blooming right then and a great deal of tidying up and gussying up has been done. So hey, we can dream a little but we need to search out our own information (from forums such as this) so we can make our own informed choices.