“Did Real Tone get worse?” That was one of my criticisms of the Pixel 8A when I reviewed it a few months ago . Google’s midrange smartphone packs a wallop for $500, but Real Tone, the camera feature designed to produce more accurate skin tones, especially for people of color, was a bit of a mixed bag. My siblings and parents said as much when we compared selfies to competing phones in the same price bracket.
Florian Koenigsberger and his team have been acting on this kind of feedback to continually tweak image processing algorithms ever since Real Tone debuted in the Pixel 6 three years ago . He’s Google’s image equity lead and the person who spearheaded the project. I got a chance to peek behind the studio curtain to see the testing Google does to refine these imaging algorithms every year—Real Tone in the latest Pixel 9 series supposedly offers some of the most notable improvements across the board since its launch.
Properly exposing darker skin tones was not a priority for film camera systems from the mid to late 1900s. Kodak's Shirley Card featured a photo of a white woman and was the tool used to calibrate the colors for printing images across the US. While many of these issues have been addressed in the digital era, it's far from resolved .
It's still not hard to find criticisms of how black skin tones appear in media , from magazine covers to feature films , often for lightening the skin tone . And remember when webcams on HP computers failed to track the f.