Pixel 6 Keeps it Real

Google introduces Real Tone on the Pixel 6

On the biggest day for television commercials, a day full of bizarre and cartoonish beer and snack food marketing weirdness, emerged one gem of a TV spot.

The ad starts by stating “Historically, camera technology hasn’t accurately represented darker skin tones.” and continues by showing old photos of people blending into the dark backgrounds, with overly exposed and washed out faces, and looking, quite frankly, how photos look. The narration over top gives an account of people recalling always looking a certain way, and the feeling of being represented less than authentically in their yearbooks and family photos. 

“Until now.” reads the copy. 

The photos that appear next are vivid, clear, vibrant, but best of all, the people in them, every shade and hue of skin color, look exactly how they would in person. Watching this ad over and over again I had a sense of very unsettling speechlessness. 

Chalk it up to lighting or exposure time, camera quality, or photography experience, growing up with darker skin always meant the photos would all be the same. I would always look different on camera than in person because that’s just how photos were. We always had to use a flash and look glossy otherwise we’d end up in the dark. Someone with my same skin tone would look “better” or more realistic on TV or in a movie because they had expensive cameras and better lighting, it was justified. 

However, just because we justify something, doesn’t mean it’s just… We didn’t know that skin tone representation was a problem because we made excuses, “that’s just the way it is”. Even though cameras have been around for over 200 years, most people didn’t think twice, it was just how we looked on camera, just like how “the camera adds ten pounds”, it’s the technology’s fault, but there’s nothing we can do to fix it. Google calls that out.

After seeing the commercial, I decided to look further into this issue that I had taken for granted. In 1954, the United States government broke up Kodak’s monopoly on producing colored photos, so they had to make smaller printers to distribute to individual print shops. Included with the printer were negatives and photo prints of Kodak employee Shirley Page. The print shop could then develop the negative and compare it to the print to calibrate their developing processes. These photos, soon known as Shirley cards, made their way around the world to calibrate not only printers, but cameras and other equipment. Very quickly, cameras around the world were optimized not just for white skin, but for one specific white woman.

I was glad to find that over the decades, photographers and filmmakers have been fighting against this industry standard. Jean Luc Godard called Kodak film racist and refused to use it while filming in 1978. More recently, a number of forums and communities have formed online, especially on Instagram, around photographing dark skin in a way that is both accurate and evocative. The Black Shutter Podcast shines a spotlight on Black photographers and photojournalists as well as the equipment they use. 

So now, here I am at the end of this 60 seconds thinking to myself, why am I just realizing this for the first time? The answer is that Google just solved a problem for a lot of people, some who were already working within the margins and many more who didn’t even admit it was a problem. It was a technological misstep thought to be insurmountable. But here we are on the other side of impossibility, and a new horizon to reach for.

Thank you, Google. 

Find out more about Real Tone™ here.