Recipe pics often don't look right to me...

I noticed that difference with the Shepherd's Pie picture and recipe too ...

Just seen this I really wish people would not take pictures of their food when they go out it hardly ever looks very nice and sometimes makes me feel rather sick all smothered in congealed grav
y and heaped on the plste followed by the comment "Yum"

Just seen this I really wish people would not take pictures of their food when they go out it hardly ever looks very nice and sometimes makes me feel rather sick all smothered in congealed grav
y and heaped on the plste followed by the comment "Yum"

I think the photos are airbrushed just like they do to people

Photographing food professionally is an art form. So is preparing the food for the photographs - there are dodges for making it stay looking fresh and hot while the photographers are taking a zillion shots. That delicate wisp of rising steam may not be steam, may not even be there at all until the shot goes into photoshop.

If the photo in a recipe is obviously not exactly of the recipe, I would suspect that the recipe hadn't been tested, and would probably not bother with it.

JackyB you need to look at the ingredients list not the pictures. Do you like all the foodstuffs that go in it, if not change them.
Unless you are cooking a very "classic dish" that has to be just right, make it as you like to suit your family.

You cannot possibly tell by just looking at a dish what herbs or spices etc might be in it. Make it, taste it, don't eat it again if you don't like it.

All the recipe books that I have written – and, as far as I know, all those written by other people for the same publishing companies – have photographs prepared from the original recipe by a home economist. She or he will always get in touch with the author if there is a problem. A stylist will organise plates, candles, glasses, cutlery, etc. and the home economist may add accompanying vegetables, salad etc. to the photograph of the final dish. (There are also often step-by-step photographs in the sorts of books I worked on.) All recipes are tested by the author, who has a testing budget, before they are submitted to the publisher.

This is not invariably the case with translations of cookbooks written in other languages and, in the course of editing, I have encountered all sorts of problems, sometimes because the translator is not a cookery expert and has gone completely off the rails and sometimes because it is quite clear to me that, for example, a moulded pudding would never set even if you left it in the fridge for 100 years. Incidentally, my favourite translator error of all time was a recipe in which she specified a quantity of jackals, unaware that, in this context, this was a name for a kind of bean rather than an African carnivore.

If the photo in a recipe is obviously not exactly of the recipe, I would suspect that the recipe hadn't been tested, and would probably not bother with it
Of all the non sequiturs!
How can you make this connection JackyB??
Food photography is an art form in itself and the various "tricks" photographers use will always make it look better. An obviously glaring difference or omission is probably down to the photographer, not whether or not the recipe has been "tested"
How do you cope when there is just a line drawing or (perish the thought) no picture at all?
Poor Mrs Beeton wouldn't have met your criteria at all

Does anyone else find the GN search facility not very helpful? I have found this especially frustrating when trying to locate recipes that have I liked the look of in previous Newsletters but want to access them at a later date.

Regarding recipes in general, they are not listed alphabetically and some are hidden under generic headings, it's all a bit of a mess.

I've emailed GNHQ who say they'll look into it.

Is it just me, though?

No, not just you Blinko... I have found this too
- but absent is right - clearly dishes are carefully enhanced for publication.
I'm not bothered if the photos are fabulous or just fine - but I do want to know they are of the actual recipe which these clearly aren't.