# Are photo ids racist ? (White Balance) **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 13, 2019, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506 "2019-02-13T23:02:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2019, 7:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/41 "2019-02-15T07:19:47Z")
> [@ftg](#): > > Black people are normal people and normal equipment should be able to make them look normal without going to any sort of extensive tweaking. > > And darker color shirts is not going to help one bit. You are quite wrong about this. Without burning and dodging or photoshop autoexposure cameras will always have trouble with competing contrasts. It doesn’t matter if it’s landscapes, white people or black people. Given that the OP is talking about ID type pictures, it could very well be the backdrop color that’s causing the problem and not the camera or the operator. ---
**Author:** ![am77494](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@am77494](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/am77494)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2019, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/42 "2019-02-15T12:20:59Z")
As a former scientist, I learnt how personal biases can skew objective observations. The thing about bias is that the bearer is usually unaware of its existence much less it’s extent. Hence the need for double blind studies for eliminating bias from observations. So to the photography professionals posting to this GQ thread I request : If most cameras were optimized for whiter skin tones and most of your photography subjects have been white, how have you eliminated bias when the statement is made : “Darker skin tones are hard to photograph accurately ? “ ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2019, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/43 "2019-02-15T15:12:01Z")
> [@am77494](#): > > As a former scientist, I learnt how personal biases can skew objective observations. The thing about bias is that the bearer is usually unaware of its existence much less it’s extent. Hence the need for double blind studies for eliminating bias from observations. > > So to the photography professionals posting to this GQ thread I request : If most cameras were optimized for whiter skin tones and most of your photography subjects have been white, how have you eliminated bias when the statement is made : “Darker skin tones are hard to photograph accurately ? “ Your question in the second paragraph makes basically no sense. First, as far as I can tell, only one person in this thread ( **pulykamell** ) has actually identified him- or herself as a photography professional. Most of us participating, I would venture, are not professionals. Also, your use of the passive voice (“when the statement is made”) renders your meaning opaque. Are you asserting that we (the photographers) are claiming to have eliminated unconscious bias? Because I don’t think anyone in this thread has made such a claim. Are you saying that the design of the cameras and our tendency to photograph more white people is, by itself, indication of bias? More generally, the very statement you are using as a reference is, in itself, a rather subjective statement. To the extent that I sometimes find darker skin tones somewhat difficult to reproduce accurately, I understand that this is product not only of things like camera optimization, but my own shortcomings as a photographer and a photo editor. As I said above, I do my best, in the editing process, to ensure that skin tones are as close as possible to what I saw in real life on the day of the photography, and I think I’m often quite successful. But this is, in some respects, an inherently subjective process. If the subjects of my images looked at themselves in these pictures, some of them might say, “Hey, I don’t think my skin is quite that dark,” or “Hey, you lightened me up too much!” I’m not really sure what your question is asking, or what sort of implicit accusation you’re making with your post. Maybe you could be a bit more clear. ---
**Author:** ![Hermitian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hermitian/32/470_2.png) [@Hermitian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hermitian)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2019, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/44 "2019-02-15T15:13:05Z")
> [@am77494](#): > > So to the photography professionals posting to this GQ thread I request : If most cameras were optimized for whiter skin tones and most of your photography subjects have been white, how have you eliminated bias when the statement is made : “Darker skin tones are hard to photograph accurately ? “ Let’s theorize on a world in which everyone had dark skin. There is no doubt that cameras would be more optimized for a darker skin color. They would be more willing to overexpose other elements in order to get the skin tones correctly. But we can’t stop there and lay it all at the feet of the camera makers. The photography lighting would be different, the default photo background color would be different. Everything involved would be slightly different to make photographing darker skin tones better. Can that be done, yep (as mentioned before, you can if you are a cinematographer who can control every variable). Is it easily or quickly done? Probably not. However, every little bit helps. For a long time it made sense that camera manufactures selling cameras to North Americans and Europeans are not going to tweak their cameras to handle darker tones better by default. That means the lighter tones will suffer and the majority of people have lighter skin and they would not be happy with the product. BUT…with today’s technology, cameras are able to (many times) pick out faces and it could adjust its exposure to optimize them. That is not something that is trivial or easy. Many times it will get it wrong, like what do you do when you have mixed races with very white and very dark faces? However, it could be an option that they offer. Every little bit helps. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2019, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/45 "2019-02-15T16:23:11Z")
I think most of this is probably due to the fact that nationwide, the country is something like 70% white even today, and as recently as the 1980s, was 80% white. Black people have never really exceeded about 15-16% of the population. And that’s not evenly distributed geographically. So Kodak probably made their Shirley cards to reflect the vast majority of photos that were developed. Nowadays, the easiest thing would be to just have the camera set up with spot metering and some sort of software that would be able to extrapolate the correct exposure based on the skin tone. It probably wouldn’t be the 18% gray, but something a bit more sophisticated. Basically the DMV person would line up the subject, look at the camera screen, tap on the person’s forehead on screen to show it where to actually meter, and let the camera adjust the exposure based on the skin tone. Or, they could do some basic post-processing similar to what DXO Photolab does with exposure and hope for the best. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2019, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/46 "2019-02-15T16:47:56Z")
> [@am77494](#): > > So to the photography professionals posting to this GQ thread I’m not a professional photographer but I did a bit of photography for others in pre-digital times. > [@](#): > > I request : If most cameras were optimized for whiter skin tones “ Why don’t you start by checking the veracity of your conditional? Or is this another ignorant rant at supposed racism? ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2019, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/47 "2019-02-15T17:19:29Z")
> [@am77494](#): > > If most cameras were optimized for whiter skin tones and most of your photography subjects have been white“ Most of the reason skin tones photograph differently has to do with how a camera determines exposure. This has been mentioned before. Now, systems get more and more complex and could and do take more information into account, but the basic nature of how exposure works is that the camera does not know whether it is taking a picture of a black subject or a white subject. Let’s start with a piece of white paper and a piece of black paper. Photograph each in autoexposure mode such that the entire sheet of paper fills the frame. The result will be both pictures looking exactly the same shade of neutral gray, even using the most sophisticated, advanced AE algorithm. The camera simply doesn’t know what it’s photographing, and it will try to expose everything to 18% gray. So, if you have a subject with dark skin tones, especially with a dark background, the dumber the AE system, the more likely it will be to overexpose the shadow tones, because it is trying to bring out shadow detail in the image and achieve a balance where the brightness values average at around 18% in the area of the frame it is evaluating, or across several “zones” in the frame. It varies by AE type and manufacturer. I would not say it is correct in this case to say the camera is biased towards white skin tones. It’s just biased towards getting an image that balances to 18% grey across the evaluative parts of the frame. The camera doesn’t know if it’s photographing a caucasian or a dark-skinned person. Now, in the issue of color balance, is it possible that systems can be tweaked to bias RGB values towards more common Caucasian skin tones vs other ethnicities? Yes, it is possible, but I do not know if any manufacturers take skin tones into account using auto settings. I know that when I do my photography, I usually have to tweak Caucasian skin tones out of the box, because I don’t like them with the default factory settings. And culturally, it can be strange. I’ve had clients ask me to lighten them up in cultures that prefer lighter skin (it’s not super common with my clientele, but I have had an Indian bride or two ask me to lighten up their skin tone.) So there is an amount of subjectivity as to what is “proper” skin tone for a subject. Of course, within a studio it’s easy to standardize. Set a target white balance that stays the same for every subject; same lighting for every subject; same lens, same camera, same lens settings, and thus create a situation where, if there is some biasing in the exposure or skin tones, it is equal across all subjects. And then you have to standardize the printing process for this as well. But that seems like an unnecessary amount of standardization for something like an ID photo, which will look different depending on what lighting condition you’re viewing it under, what angle you’re looking at it, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2019, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/48 "2019-02-15T18:10:05Z")
> [@](#): > > As a former scientist, I learnt how personal biases can skew objective observations. The thing about bias is that the bearer is usually unaware of its existence much less it’s extent. Hence the need for double blind studies for eliminating bias from observations. From the comments in the article I linked in post #28: > [@](#): > > The word “bias”, when applied to technology, processes, systems, etc., simply means that the outcomes are not evenly distributed for all ranges of input. A camera sensor, for instance, can have a blue bias. Saying so doesn’t mean that the developers are being accused of hating red and green, simply that the sensor records more blue. > All they say in the video is that the early set of requirements for film led to film that was biased toward lighter skin. Once again, the word “bias” there is being used in a technical sense to say that detail and tone were being rendered far better in light skin that dark skin with the film of the time. > I would also point out that this wasn’t a limitation of technology at the time. There definitely was a human element to why this was the behavior. That being said, if anything, the video just implies simply that the people being photographed at the time were white, so they built their product to the set of requirements that entailed. and > [@](#): > > “Black people” are dark. “White people” are not dark. One reflects more light than the other. For most of its existence, film stock has had a combination of poor dynamic range and terribly low ASA/ISO numbers; 1935 Kodachrome was ISO 10 (not 100, 10) 1961 Kodachrome was ISO 25, 1962 Kodachrome was ISO 64, and it wouldn’t get up to ISO 200 for quite some time thereafter. Remember that ISO 100 is considered “daylight” film and you’d only generally want to use it for outdoor shooting when the sun was in the sky; this film in the 1960s was even less sensitive. > Now what happens when you have very low ISO, low dynamic range, and require heavy lighting to be able to expose midtones? That’s right, you end up with an overall bias against dark objects. “Black people” (really just various shades of brown) are dark. “White people” are not. White skin is closer to other midtones in a frame than dark skin. The “bias” against “black” people is caused by the harsh reality of light exposure and limitations of tech in the day. and > [@](#): > > granted, there was definitely some implicit racism going on – it was the 60’s – when kodak chose a white woman named shirley to sit for a film test. and it was probably smart business, at the time, too: most of their customers were probably white, and pointing their cameras at white faces. that’s all true. > what isn’t factual is how shirley was used, what part chemistry plays, and how she factors into this debate. > shirley was NEVER used to judge tonality – light and dark. that’s what the grey patches next to her are for. the darkest one is your black point, the lightest one your white point. shirley was there as a quick example of an actual picture, and because the assumption was that a photo lab tech could more easily see if the color (not the tone, the color) was off on skintones. speaking for a second as a photo lab tech, this is false for me, personally. i find it much easier to see the color balance on a neutral grey strip, but i’ve been told i’m unusual. i also have perfect color vision. basically, in my lab, shirley goes right in the trash, and i run a greyscale strip through a densitometer. > further, it’s not the film chemistry in color negatives that determines the colors (which still have nothing to do with this problem). it’s the dyes in the layers of the emulsion. and yes, some “portrait” films specifically tone down reds/browns so white people don’t look blotchy and overly pinkish. this also tends to look good for black people, so, whatever. > what we’re really dealing with is a) limited latitude of older color films, and b) metering problems in the camera. i don’t think these two things were mentioned at all in the video. how these two interact should be obvious to any photographer, which i hope is most of the target audience here. film will make pictures of anything, given enough light. it doesn’t see “oh, it’s a black person, better make them look awful!” that’d be silly. what’s happening is that the person’s skintone is below neutral grey, cameras meter slightly above neutral grey, and bring it down to preserve highlights. and the film doesn’t have the latitude in the shadows to show enough detail or range of tones, because it’s been underexposed. and that’s it. > so if anyone was racist, it’s the camera manufacturers. the decision to meter heavily in the center and at slightly above neuteral was based on the assumption that cameras would be pointed at white or asian people. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2019, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/49 "2019-02-15T20:20:50Z")
**On further review:** > [@D\_Anconia](#): > > On which grounds do you imagine such a law would be Constitutional? I thought I remembered something like this recently. [Indeed, you produced almost the exact same threadshit](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=21455638#post21455638) a couple of weeks ago. Since a note from **engineer\_comp\_geek** at the time didn’t get through to you, I’m upgrading this to an official Warning. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2019, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/50 "2019-02-15T21:46:08Z")
> [@Lucas\_Jackson](#): > > You are quite wrong about this. Without burning and dodging or photoshop autoexposure cameras will always have trouble with competing contrasts. It doesn’t matter if it’s landscapes, white people or black people. Given that the OP is talking about ID type pictures, it could very well be the backdrop color that’s causing the problem and not the camera or the operator. Yes, auto-stuff does things wrong for people with dark skin. _That’s the whole freakin’ point!_ Things are _by default_ not set up to properly handle a large section of the population! The solution is to fix things in the tech. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2019, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/51 "2019-02-16T03:30:23Z")
> [@Hermitian](#): > > But we can’t stop there and lay it all at the feet of the camera makers. The photography lighting would be different, the default photo background color would be different. Everything involved would be slightly different to make photographing darker skin tones better. Can that be done, yep (as mentioned before, you can if you are a cinematographer who can control every variable). Is it easily or quickly done? Probably not. Right. It seems that, at least in terms of the overall question about optimizing the camera, one of the OP’s biggest failings is an apparent misunderstanding of how exposure and lighting are actually dealt with by the camera’s metering system, and expressed in the subsequent exposure. There seems to be an assumption that you can just make some corrections regarding how the camera deals with skin tones, and everything else will remain the same, but that’s not how exposure works. While cameras are getting increasingly sophisticated in their ability to deal with varying light conditions, especially contrast, if there’s one thing that I have come to appreciate as a photographer, it’s not the technology in the cameras; it’s the incredible ability of the human eye/brain combination to deal with a massive variety of lighting conditions. We can look at a scene with bright sunlight, deep shadows, different colors, and different lighting sources, and as we look around the scene our eyes and our brains make tiny, almost instantaneous adjustments (some of them mere inferences based on past experience) in order to take in and comprehend as much of the scene as possible. This is especially true for lighting-related issues such as the color temperature of the light sources, and the dynamic range of the scene. We can “see” the warmer light of a tungsten bulb, but we correct for it automatically. We can see that the deep shadow is much much darker than the bright sunlight, but when we look at the shadow we automatically adjust to take in the details. Cameras don’t quite work like this, or at least not with such incredible speed and detail. For all of the massive improvements in camera technology, the fact is that, when you press the shutter, you have to reduce the whole scene to some sort of average or ideal value. You aren’t really able to make adjustments within the scene, at least not when to take the picture; you are recording it with a single aperture and a single shutter speed, which means that many areas of the scene will not be rendered in a way that resembles what you see with the naked eye. This doesn’t mean that everything looks bad. One area where digital photography has improved immensely over the last decade or so is in that area of dynamic range. What this essentially means is the amount of lighting range, from bright highlights to dark shadows, that the camera’s sensor is able to capture while still preserving enough detail for later adjustment. For example, Nikon’s last DSLR, the D850, has a dynamic range of about 14 Exposure Value (EV), or 14 “f-stops” of light. Each EV or f-stop doubles (or halves, depending on the direction) the amount of light. So if your scene has a range of 14 EV, it means that the lightest part of the scene is 2[sup]14[/sup] times as bright as the dimmest part. That’s a range of about 16,000 to 1. But while a modern camera like the D850 might be able to photograph a scene with a dynamic range of 14 EV, it won’t render all parts of that scene as the eye sees them. What the excellent dynamic range means is that, when the photographer puts the digital picture file onto the computer, he or she can then use software like Lightroom to process the picture, bringing up detail in the shadows and bringing down the highlights, or whatever is neceesary to render the scene in the desired way. It’s worth noting that this works far, far better if you use the RAW files from the camera, rather than the JPEGs. The RAW files record the data as it hits the sensor, leaving as much data as possible and allowing a much greater ability to process the image in a wide variety of ways. Of course, the OP was asking about cameras, but was also asking specifically about ID photos. This changes things in a couple of ways: on the one hand, the cameras used for ID photos are often much less sophisticated than the D850; on the other hand, the specific photographic conditions for ID photos are generally much more consistent and straightforward than a typical scene. As **bump** notes, above, it would probably be relatively easy to set up an ID camera system to expose various types of skin tones pretty consistently and accurately. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2019, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/52 "2019-02-16T05:17:41Z")
The ID/lisence photo cameras are likely lowest-bid contractor-quality hardware, poor lighting, and an almost entirely untrained employee taking the photo as quicky and indifferently as possible. And–something not mentioned yet–the printer for the photo is probably built with speed and throughput prioritized over quality, too. Nobody in a “stand the person against a nearby wall, click a button and say ‘next!’” setting is going to have the skill, equipment, or time of [a professional studio photographer](https://www.nyip.edu/photo-articles/fun-stuff-for-photographers/photographing-people-of-color). ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2019, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/53 "2019-02-16T05:31:25Z")
I should note, by the way, that ID photos don’t just get dark-skinned people wrong. For quite a while, until we had new pictures taken for new licenses, my wife and I (both of us pasty Anglos) had our skin tones very poorly reproduced on our California drivers licenses. My wife’s face had an odd green-tinted cast to it, and my face had an orange hue just a bit lighter than one of Willy Wonka’s Oompa-Loompas. ---
**Author:** ![Brayne\_Ded](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Brayne\_Ded](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brayne_Ded)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2019, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/54 "2019-02-17T20:40:13Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > I watched that video. It ignores the simplest explanation: money. They were selling to people taking photos of white people. Note that when there was demand for films which worked well with black subjects they produced films that worked well with black subjects. Which film was that? I never saw any color film that claimed better results for different races. Since two of the biggest film makers were in Japan, did they have export versions of their films? I found that film bought in Japan was fine for all faces of all races, subject to getting the exposure right. Regarding black faces, I have seen reports that the face recognition software generally used is not as accurate with black faces. Is it the skin tone, or the facial geometry? AFAIK, the programs work on the latter. And the Chinese have systems that work just fine in the PRC, so perhaps there is some tweaking for a particular race. ---
**Author:** ![Littleman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ccd318/32.png) [@Littleman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Littleman)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2019, 5:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/55 "2019-02-18T05:09:54Z")
I’m not pastie by any means, my normal skin tone is a bit like a white person who tans a little and almost got sunburnt yesterday. Yet most of my IDs I’m either completely washed out so there’s no face there or I look like George hamilton. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2019, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506/56 "2019-02-19T15:58:01Z")
I think that ultimately VERY few people get a good looking drivers’ licence or ID picture. Most are either underexposed or underexposed. I think a lot of it is that the cameras are cheap and idiot-proof, and intended to be fast rather than accurate. It’s been most of a decade since my last driver’s license photo, but I remember it being basically “Go stand on that line- look here (points at some target on the camera) and smile!” I ended up kind of underexposed, and I’m super-white. That said, when I got my latest work badge, they used what looks like a webcam to take my photo, and it looks fine. And so do all my black co-workers’ badge pictures. I suspect that the Texas DMV camera back in 2009 was probably the model they bought when they first switched to digital photos and was just old and crappy. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-photo-ids-racist-white-balance/829506.md?page=2)