Hacker News Reader

Comment by britzkopf | Hacker News Reader

"Cannot be successfully photographed" Um... What? I may not be a professional photographer, so perhaps there are some color correction nuances I'm not detecting, but I've been seeing pictures of very dark skinned people for DECADES with absolutely nothing particularly jarring or memorable about the quality, or lack thereof, of the image. I recall Google making a huge deal about this at their last event. Like, "finally we can photograph black people because all our equipment isn't racist anymore!", and I didn't understand it then either.

View on HN

Taking photos of people with darker skin tones isn’t harder, but it is different. And if you don’t know that, those photos will often lose facial features and look flat.

There’s lot of history here, some of it debatable, but the general story is…

Early film developing used a sample photo of a white brunette as the standard for white balance.

Some time later, ad agencies complained to Kodak that photos of chocolates and dark woods weren’t quite right.

Kodak made some tweaks. And/or photographers learned to deal with it (both for product photos and people).

Digital cameras appear. Similar mistakes/oversights made by industry.

Now Google and others claim their cameras can do dark skin.

What's the most parsimonious take. 1) at the inception of ubiquitous photography there was a path of equipment development that allowed for equal quality images of any skin tone, but those in charge spitefully decided they didn't want people with dark skin represented. 2) seeing detail in dark objects of any kind is more difficult (something we all know from using our eyes) and no one felt compelled to spend a lot of time wrestling with this very difficult problem when, at the end of the day, everyone has the general sense that, despite never having met him, they have a good idea of what Miles Davis looks like.

I don't think there was any spite involved in Kodak's early film work. Or imaging work by Olympus, Sony, and anybody else was involved in early digital camera development.

But, by the time we got to Google and Apple? The problems with photographing dark subjects would have been well understood. It's sad that it took being "outed" in the media for those companies to actively address the issue.

What I don't know is how much of the issue was "new" (re-introduced by the software behind the phone camera magic) or "existing" (the same problem with color/white balance that has existed since the dawn of photography). If it was "new", that's rather damning, IMO, since the problem space was known, and the product people chose to ignore it. Put another way - some of this is just physics, but how much was physics and how much was software ignoring one set of subjects in an effort to improve outcomes for another?

But, no, probably not intentionally spiteful. Just some combination of lazy, greedy, and ignorant.

> Just some combination of lazy, greedy, and ignorant.

In other words, very standard human behaviour, irrespective of any racial considerations.

Presumably GP means some sort of facial recognition system, eg at the DMV.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com