Alan - As a commercial photographer, I have to work on more than my share of stock images of all types for various clients and from a variety of stock houses. Obviously, I haven't seen images from all the different agencies, but quite a few, and I'd have to say that it's rare when I come across and image I can use as is. I'd rather get a slightly conservative image that's easier for me to mold to what I need, but so much of what I see needs basic tone control - setting endpoints, fixing color casts, local contrast enhancing, dodging and burning, not to mention dust spots from dirty sensors. The stock images I see from film uniformly suffer from substandard scans, but then, my standards for film scans are very very high. I don't think that most agencies do much work on the images themselves. As far as I can tell, they rely on the contributing photographer to be competent enough to provide an image as they see fit.