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In the 99pi episode they talk about how Kodak released better film in the 70s/80s that could take good pictures of dark people and marketed it as “Able to photo

by Swizec 5y ago

In the 99pi episode they talk about how Kodak released better film in the 70s/80s that could take good pictures of dark people and marketed it as “Able to photograph the details of a dark horse in low light”. Widely considered a coded phrase for black people.

silisili 5y ago
Marketing speak, no matter how poor taste. I mean, how long have laundry soaps been saying they make whites whiter? At my age, soaps should be making plasma if these advances held any credence. That aside...my wife is a dark skinned person. That I cannot take a normal photo of her without blowing out the background is infuriating. Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob. If I click her face, she looks normal but standing in front of a nuclear blast. Not because I think any company is racist, but because I wonder why we are still stuck with it. If our eyes see people in a way, and have for all of time, why in the age of nanobots and ai and everything else still failing so badly?
- jacobolus 5y ago
  > cannot take a normal photo of her without blowing out the background If your wife’s skin is significantly darker than the background and your photographic process doesn’t have the dynamic range for both, you can e.g. use fill flash, bounce extra light off a large reflector onto her face, use a filter over the lens (works well for taking B&W images in some situations), or take a picture using a process with better dynamic range (and optionally play with the image when printing, either lightening specific parts or applying some global lightness curve; e.g. you can take 2 pictures with one exposed for the foreground and the other exposed for the background and blend them in software). > Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob. This happens to a substantial extent to people of all skin tones, though the darker the skin the harder it gets. The sunset is much, much brighter than foreground objects. Try fill flash (and if the results are poor, try to figure out how to position your flash somewhere further from the lens, e.g. by using a separate flash).
  - silisili 5y ago
    I much appreciate the advice, it's not lost on me. I guess I'm just confused why we cannot solve this problem today in a normalish way, as our eyes see things. And more confused that we call tech from 50 years ago racist because it could also not achieve it.
    - Swizec 5y ago
      I think our brains use a lot of visual processing to make that work. Similar to how modern phones use AI object detection to identify important parts of low light photos and use different lighting params for different parts. My iphone 13 for example visibly highlights my face in a backlit selfie a few seconds after taking the photo.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      It's an example of Moravec's paradox, in which something that seems intuitive, simple, and utterly effortless to us turns out to be massively difficult to do in software. In this case, it's a matter of raw processing power and Moore's law eventually catching up to the dynamic range of human vision, but there are sporadic deep learning attempts to tackle it. https://gizmodo.com/this-amazing-camera-can-capture-both-the-sun-and-the-st-5911315 https://gizmodo.com/this-amazing-camera-can-capture-both-the... The size of sensors is decreasing, and currently you can recreate the performance of that 2012 tech with a sensor about 20% its size but about the same price. The problem with cameras is this: You need more sensors crammed into smaller space (megapixels) with higher resolution of the range of frequencies each sensor captures (dynamic range,) and/or a higher rate of sampling per sensor to improve the quality of images (framerate.) The chips used are already running at maximum speed, so the size of a sensor is constrained by how many pixels can be processed at framerates expected by consumers, usually 30 to 60 fps for video. You can adjust the dynamic range using physical color filters in the lenses, removing all infrared for example. Then the sensors will only trigger on visible light, and you can tweak the sensors to bethere are other tricks used to optimize what's being captured. The issue is sensitivity - the number of photons hitting a sensor required to activate it. Darker colors reflect fewer photons, so lighter colors "overwhelm" the sensors. Even multiple samples can't overcome some of the limitations, among which is certain conditions in which black skin shows up weirdly in video and images (to the perennial frustration of digital photographers, and a frequent topic of complaint amongst pornographers.) https://www.ovt.com/sensors/OV9716 https://www.ovt.com/sensors/OV9716 This latest high end sensor has between 18-20 bits of dynamic range, or 120db resolution. This is getting close to human performance, and if the world doesn't fall apart in the next ten years, there will be human equivalent hdr cameras on phones, and there won't be a camera problem for darker skinned people anymore. In the meantime, if your camera can save photos in .raw format, it's the unprocessed output from the sensor itself. You can process the raw pictures with desktop applications like photoshop to correct the colors, and turn those sunset photos of your wife into memories instead of disappointments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format There's a whole slew of tutorials and applications for correcting issues with skin tones and different lighting conditions. There's a bit of a learning curve, but something most people can accomplish in an afternoon.
- creato 5y ago
  Capturing bigger differences between highlights and shadows (i.e. dynamic range) is one of the primary goals of camera manufacturers. It's one of the most critical aspects of camera performance, and they're competing to deliver better dynamic range. We're stuck with it because it's a hard problem.
  - silisili 5y ago
    So, not being argumentative but curious, and also rather uneducated here...why? Where is the big disconnect in that our own eyes can do these things so easily, and no camera can? It's not any insult to cameras, but a genuine question.
    - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
      The short answer is that human eyes have really good dynamic range (around 24 bits). For comparison, most monitors only have 8 bit pixels, and the best cameras have around 16 bits. That means that human eyes are much better at perceiving combinations of bright and dim areas at the same time.
      - silisili 5y ago
        Me being dumb, again. Why cannot our cameras have 24 bit or more range?
        dagmx 5y ago
        Physics and data processing. Our eyes aren't actually 24 bit per frame. In fact our eyes are pretty shit. What they're good at is fairly quickly moving and adjusting, and are backed by a processor (our brain) that is capable of converting that data into a spatially aware image. In fact our brain doesn't even really see much of the view. It's filling in a lot of blanks based on the understanding of the scene. Cameras are trying to capture that into a still. You can capture multiple stills together with different exposures, but you're going to battle things like motion etc.. Most cameras these days are in the 10-14 bit range which is a function of the range the photosites will respond too before saturating, but also given that most displays are 8 bit, after a point there's just diminishing gains. 14 bits allows for a lot of latitude when shooting and processing.
jollybean 5y ago
So the evil racist film makers designed a film specifically to help a group look better, but then used sneaky KKK 'coded language' to denigrate them? Or maybe that would make no sense, so there's no basis for your conspiratorial conjecture.
- Swizec 5y ago
  I’m just quoting the podcast episode we’re all commenting on.

by Swizec 5y ago

silisili 5y ago

Marketing speak, no matter how poor taste. I mean, how long have laundry soaps been saying they make whites whiter? At my age, soaps should be making plasma if these advances held any credence. That aside...my wife is a dark skinned person. That I cannot take a normal photo of her without blowing out the background is infuriating. Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob. If I click her face, she looks normal but standing in front of a nuclear blast. Not because I think any company is racist, but because I wonder why we are still stuck with it. If our eyes see people in a way, and have for all of time, why in the age of nanobots and ai and everything else still failing so badly?

jacobolus 5y ago
> cannot take a normal photo of her without blowing out the background If your wife’s skin is significantly darker than the background and your photographic process doesn’t have the dynamic range for both, you can e.g. use fill flash, bounce extra light off a large reflector onto her face, use a filter over the lens (works well for taking B&W images in some situations), or take a picture using a process with better dynamic range (and optionally play with the image when printing, either lightening specific parts or applying some global lightness curve; e.g. you can take 2 pictures with one exposed for the foreground and the other exposed for the background and blend them in software). > Think a simple sunset pic. If I just snap, she looks like a black blob. This happens to a substantial extent to people of all skin tones, though the darker the skin the harder it gets. The sunset is much, much brighter than foreground objects. Try fill flash (and if the results are poor, try to figure out how to position your flash somewhere further from the lens, e.g. by using a separate flash).
- silisili 5y ago
  I much appreciate the advice, it's not lost on me. I guess I'm just confused why we cannot solve this problem today in a normalish way, as our eyes see things. And more confused that we call tech from 50 years ago racist because it could also not achieve it.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    I think our brains use a lot of visual processing to make that work. Similar to how modern phones use AI object detection to identify important parts of low light photos and use different lighting params for different parts. My iphone 13 for example visibly highlights my face in a backlit selfie a few seconds after taking the photo.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    It's an example of Moravec's paradox, in which something that seems intuitive, simple, and utterly effortless to us turns out to be massively difficult to do in software. In this case, it's a matter of raw processing power and Moore's law eventually catching up to the dynamic range of human vision, but there are sporadic deep learning attempts to tackle it. https://gizmodo.com/this-amazing-camera-can-capture-both-the-sun-and-the-st-5911315 https://gizmodo.com/this-amazing-camera-can-capture-both-the... The size of sensors is decreasing, and currently you can recreate the performance of that 2012 tech with a sensor about 20% its size but about the same price. The problem with cameras is this: You need more sensors crammed into smaller space (megapixels) with higher resolution of the range of frequencies each sensor captures (dynamic range,) and/or a higher rate of sampling per sensor to improve the quality of images (framerate.) The chips used are already running at maximum speed, so the size of a sensor is constrained by how many pixels can be processed at framerates expected by consumers, usually 30 to 60 fps for video. You can adjust the dynamic range using physical color filters in the lenses, removing all infrared for example. Then the sensors will only trigger on visible light, and you can tweak the sensors to bethere are other tricks used to optimize what's being captured. The issue is sensitivity - the number of photons hitting a sensor required to activate it. Darker colors reflect fewer photons, so lighter colors "overwhelm" the sensors. Even multiple samples can't overcome some of the limitations, among which is certain conditions in which black skin shows up weirdly in video and images (to the perennial frustration of digital photographers, and a frequent topic of complaint amongst pornographers.) https://www.ovt.com/sensors/OV9716 https://www.ovt.com/sensors/OV9716 This latest high end sensor has between 18-20 bits of dynamic range, or 120db resolution. This is getting close to human performance, and if the world doesn't fall apart in the next ten years, there will be human equivalent hdr cameras on phones, and there won't be a camera problem for darker skinned people anymore. In the meantime, if your camera can save photos in .raw format, it's the unprocessed output from the sensor itself. You can process the raw pictures with desktop applications like photoshop to correct the colors, and turn those sunset photos of your wife into memories instead of disappointments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format There's a whole slew of tutorials and applications for correcting issues with skin tones and different lighting conditions. There's a bit of a learning curve, but something most people can accomplish in an afternoon.
creato 5y ago
Capturing bigger differences between highlights and shadows (i.e. dynamic range) is one of the primary goals of camera manufacturers. It's one of the most critical aspects of camera performance, and they're competing to deliver better dynamic range. We're stuck with it because it's a hard problem.
- silisili 5y ago
  So, not being argumentative but curious, and also rather uneducated here...why? Where is the big disconnect in that our own eyes can do these things so easily, and no camera can? It's not any insult to cameras, but a genuine question.
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    The short answer is that human eyes have really good dynamic range (around 24 bits). For comparison, most monitors only have 8 bit pixels, and the best cameras have around 16 bits. That means that human eyes are much better at perceiving combinations of bright and dim areas at the same time.
    - silisili 5y ago
      Me being dumb, again. Why cannot our cameras have 24 bit or more range?
      - dagmx 5y ago
        Physics and data processing. Our eyes aren't actually 24 bit per frame. In fact our eyes are pretty shit. What they're good at is fairly quickly moving and adjusting, and are backed by a processor (our brain) that is capable of converting that data into a spatially aware image. In fact our brain doesn't even really see much of the view. It's filling in a lot of blanks based on the understanding of the scene. Cameras are trying to capture that into a still. You can capture multiple stills together with different exposures, but you're going to battle things like motion etc.. Most cameras these days are in the 10-14 bit range which is a function of the range the photosites will respond too before saturating, but also given that most displays are 8 bit, after a point there's just diminishing gains. 14 bits allows for a lot of latitude when shooting and processing.

jollybean 5y ago

So the evil racist film makers designed a film specifically to help a group look better, but then used sneaky KKK 'coded language' to denigrate them? Or maybe that would make no sense, so there's no basis for your conspiratorial conjecture.

Swizec 5y ago
I’m just quoting the podcast episode we’re all commenting on.