Florian: Hey, y'all. I'm Florian,
and I lead Google's Image Equity Initiative,
our cross-product mission to improve camera and image tools
for people of color.
Going back decades, cameras have centered light skin--
a bias that's crept into many of our modern digital
imaging products and algorithms,
especially because they're not being tested
with diverse enough groups of people.
Photos are symbols of what and who matter to us collectively,
so it's critical that they work equitably for everyone-
especially communities of color like mine,
who haven't always been seen fairly by these tools.
This year, one of the advances in Pixel 6 and Google Photos
that we're most excited about is Real Tone.
We knew that building for the community meant we had to acknowledge our own gaps
and learn from the folks who know this issue best.
So we started by working with image experts, like photographers,
cinematographers, and colorists- who are celebrated
for their beautiful and accurate imagery of communities of color.
We asked them to test our cameras
in a wide range of tough lighting conditions.
And in the process, they took thousands of portraits
that made our image data sets 25x more diverse
to look more like the world around us.
They worked directly with our engineers,
telling them what was already working well,
and where we needed to do better, to make sure our images
highlighted the nuances of all skin tones equally.
And... they kept it real:
Zuly: When they had a really white background on the back
or a light or anything, like, they just looked very washed out.
Natacha: And you know, it's a beautiful pink sunset,
there's no reason why she should be looking this green.
Kira: For this, I would love it if the camera...if
this...if this picture was darker.
Deun: The second image, absolutely not.
It...No. It was just...the color was... everything was just ashy.
Adrienne: If there isn't adequate light,
the skin can sometimes skew a little gray or desaturated.
When you take a picture of someone and they look gray?
Like, that's not, you know, that's not good.
Mambu: It negated the blue. It, like, washed out the blue
that would've had the...the brown hue show up more in the skin.
Kira: I think that the instinct is suddenly
if somebody is not used to shooting darker skin tones
the...the instinct is to just be
like, you know, to shoot them much brighter.
And it's just like no, there really is like--we should appreciate
and really sort of work toward, like, all the different hues
and all the different tonalities.
Mambu: How do we make sure that when someone grabs that phone,
and it takes a photo of them, they see themselves?
Kira: It should be that everybody just kind of looks like they look.
Florian: All of that wisdom helped us
make a more equitable camera.
First, to make a great portrait,
your phone has to SEE a face in the picture. Our experts helped us
improve our face detection models, so the camera sees you as you are...
From there, we improved our auto-white balance
tuning to better reflect the beauty of your skin tone
and we improved our auto-exposure
tuning to make sure your skin looks like you-
not unnaturally darker or brighter.
They also inspired our teams to make advances
like algorithmically reducing stray light
that can make darker skin tones look ashy or washed out.
And making Night Sight Portraits less blurry for folks like me.
All of these changes are part of Real Tone,
improvements that led these experts to vote Pixel 6
as the most inclusive camera available.
In a blind test across top smartphone cameras,
they rated Pixel 6's camera as best in rendering skin tone,
brightness, richness, and detail for people of color.
Google Photos will also have Real Tone baked
into its auto-enhance editing feature, so you always feel seen, from the instant
you take a photo to the moment you edit and share it.
But this mission goes beyond Google apps:
Real Tone will improve the camera performance for photos
and videos in third-party apps like Snapchat.
Because feeling seen shouldn't be limited to just one tool or company.
This fall, we partnered with "The New York Times"
to see how some of the most compelling contemporary image makers
put Real Tone to work in their own art.
Let's take a look.
Vida: For decades, you know, there've been generalizations
made about people of color in imagery
and just how they've been shown and show up in their portrayals.
It whitewashes our history in some ways.
Image technology was calibrated for white skin,
and that meant that the variety and spectrum of colors
had to therefore conform to that calibration.
Picture Progress is a campaign created by a T Brand,
our content studio at "New York Times"
Advertising in partnership with Google.
The campaign for us is an opportunity to literally lay the groundwork
of opening the dialogue around, what does it look like
to have a more equitable and visually representative future?
We put the Pixel 6 camera in the hands of BIPOC creators.
We felt as though getting their unique perspective
on image equity was very important.
Kennedi Carter joined us on this effort,
we're so excited to work with her.
What we love about Kennedi is that her work expresses
and really captures and elicits really unique questions
around what does "pride" and "power" and "compassion"
and "poise" mean in the Black community?
Kennedi: It's important to think of images as facts.
Whether it's an image of your family
and your grandma cooking dinner or it's something like a protest,
this will be a point of reference for a very long time.
I found that a lot of my sitters looked good no matter where they were.
And that was just straight out of camera,
and people were also looking at the image output,
and they were like, "Wow, this looks really great."
If you're an artist, you should go into every community
with the intention of trying to elevate a voice
and make people feel heard and make people feel good
and make people feel proud.
Vida: This will be a game changer for sure.
There's something very empowering about being able to see yourself
as you see yourself.
To see the nuances that make us all unique.
Being able to know that you take a photo with a group of friends
and everyone is represented equally,
all of their beautiful hues are showing up in the same photo.
It's our truth in our hands.