There was a thread some time back, maybe several years, that touched on whether the design of photographic film treated different ethnicities with different skin tones preferentially better or worse.
I can’t find it. The Search function is returning an error, something about contacting a server failing.
But here is a link to an article specifically about this problem – I knew there was something to this!
Does anybody remember that thread?
I do. I think the thread was about the Buzzfeed article linked in your article.
I started a thread “Is photographic technology racist?” In MPSIMS.
Yes, obviously this problem is the result of photographic engineers hating non-white people.
I suspect you read the title but not the thread itself.
Without reading the article either (yet) I’m going to assume it says something like photographers consistently used the technology such that it would accent and accentuate photos of light-skinned faces far more than it did darker ones. To which I say, so what?
From a technical perspective, brightness and contrast are going to effect light skin more than dark skin, and from an economic one minorities always represented a much smaller market in general.
It’s not about what photographers did. Why don’t you read the article first, or the thread?
I’m ready to fight. Who is with me?
Fine, it wasn’t the photographers themselves but the film chemistry engineers. I still stand by my above post and say so what…
Here’s a video about how photographic film has traditionally been designed for white people rather than black people:
And here's an article about it:I would say that although the description of the technical issues is correct, the commentary is a little naive, and is clearly written by a non-photographer looking for conformation of the basic thesis.
First up, a very large about of photography is not portraiture. When I was seriously into film photography it was a given that you selected your film for purpose. And there were film stocks specifically intended for portraiture, and film stocks that were great for landscapes, action, studio work, and so on. It was well understood that you got sub-par results if your film was not best suited to purpose. Weddings were a big deal, and there was film that was really specifically good for that. But if you wanted vibrant colour, you have would not be using that film on people.
The cited article above notes that Kodachrome was not kind to black skin. It wasn’t kind to white either. But in different ways. It was a finicky film, but it was, in its day, the absolute best for vivid nature shots. Until the advent of digital pretty much all of National Geographic was shot on it. Especially Kodachrome 25, which was a harsh mistress, but could deliver in spades when you got it right. (What killed Kodachrome early was Fuji Velvia, which didn’t suffer from the same finickiness in exposure, and had luscious greens, and was an E-6 process, so could be processed by anyone.) Being a positive process, Kodachrome inherently was exacting, there was absolutely no wiggle room, and dark skin would have always been inherently difficult to manage. Getting any shadow detail with that film was always an uphill battle. I’m sure that if the technology existed, Kodak would have jumped on it to get that extra dynamic range.
The wide world of colour negative film got you just about anything you wanted. Kodak marketed half a dozen different films, all with different colour traits. But Kodak wasn’t the only game. Other big players like Agfa and Fuji, and a zillion smaller, also marketed their own. And they were all different.
The articles do get an critical part right. Film processes tend to be balanced to get the most obvious thing the right colour. Which is sometimes not what you think it is. Weddings, the thing that absolutely must be the right colour is the bride’s dress. Photographers would take samples of the material and balance the prints to ensure the dress was spot on. White dresses were easy, but all hell would break loose if the white dress had a hint of colour cast. But after this, clearly the skin colours should look reasonable, and here the predominance of white skinned subjects would have the a balance of the rendition favour such the the range of tones the average caucasian had, would render passably well. But it was amazing what you could get away with so long as the dresses came out right.
But there has been a long lived industry in make-up for photography, and it has always understood that what look good to the eye is not what looks good to the camera - and so make-up for portraiture has always compensated for colour rendition issues, no matter what the skin colour of the subject. The examples of poor colour rendition of black actors in movies suggests a level of incompetence/indifference in the makeup department of Hollywood to the requirements of black skin as much as it does the film stock maker.
Colour rendering is a horridly difficult art. Even with modern digital cameras there is a huge set of compromises made, and no matter what is photographed there will be problems rendering accurate (or even acceptable) colours of some elements in the final result.
The first time I saw a multi-racial “Shirley” test photo my reaction was “really? - You think your film is good enough to manage that?” No doubt, if everyone had dark skin, the film manufactures would have worked harder and earlier to improve the process. Because they were catering to a perceived market of whites they stopped earlier, because fair skin is technically much easier to get right.
Excellent post, Francis Vaughan. For me, the greatest challenge is getting the color right.
And I completely agree that it is not a fair criticism of film to pick on Kodachrome or Velvia slide film–these are not tools for portraiture. A portrait of anyone done with Velvia will likely result in an orange cast to their features.
A more fair comparison would be using a proper portrait film stock like Kodak Portra 160.
The first time I started photographing color charts I was amazed at how far from reality photographs are. Even if you tweak everything to get the swatches looking just right, the remaining photos often don’t look that great.
I realized that engineers then and now have been trying to tune the color response of inadequate dyes in order to get them to reproduce certain targeted subjects in a pleasing, if not accurate, manner. And, those imperfect dyes look amazing when used on the subjects they were designed for, even if a color chart would look all wonky.
So it makes sense that the engineers of the day would optimize things for those Shirley cards, representing a large portion of their market at the time. Racist? Not sure if the intent was there. Unfairly biased toward Caucasians? Yes.
My recommendation to anyone trying to get the exposure, white balance, and overall tones correct in modern photography is this: Shoot in RAW.
You can’t change a decision the in-camera JPEG processor baked into the cake, unless you have the original cake ingredients available to you.
RAW photography allows much more freedom in exposure and white balance adjustments.
These days I use VSCO Film color profiles in Lightroom to make my bland digital photographs emulate one film stock or another–I really do like Kodak Portra 160 and Fuji 160C for portraiture, and most of the slide film profiles still look garish on people (though landscapes look amazing).
I think that perhaps the most common problem I face with darker skin is that once the white balance and exposure are set I often see an orange cast. Sometimes this can be addressed by a slight cooling down of the white balance.
And, on top of all of this, what we are seeing is a reflection or a rendition of a screen, made up of tiny dots.
A photograph that looks good under fluorescents, may not look good under LEDs. If it looks good on a Sony screen it may not on an Acer, and if either is badly adjusted (as most of them reportedly are) it will look ‘wrong’ on both.
In a previous life I designed parts of computer printers and “color mapping” was one of the last development tasks even after the machine was in prototype production. The graphics you see on the computer screen are not translated directly into some YMCK defiinition but the “recipe” of ink or toner dots was always tweaked toward the intended market - even on the same model printer. The American color map tends to make wihite people look radiant, maybe pink-ish; the European color map was bland and pastel, and the Asian color map accented primary colors as in foliage and flowers.