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Comment by jimmywanger | Hacker News Reader

FTA:

> By the 1990s, it was finally dawning on film creators and processors, too, that using a white-skinned person as the universal standard was short-changing people of every other skin tone.

I don't quite understand this statement. The point of the China Girl was having a fairly agreed upon color to make sure the film was developed properly.

As long as you were pretty sure what the color was supposed to be, you could kind of judge how good the film was.

Introducing other ethnicities would defeat the purpose.

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Here's an article [1] expanding on the issue. Quoting: "If you exposed film for a white kid, the black kid sitting next to him would be rendered invisible except for the whites of his eyes and teeth".

Apparently, the ones who brought up the issue were not concerned citizens, but wood and chocolate manufacturers.

[1] https://petapixel.com/2015/09/19/heres-a-look-at-how-color-f...

Interesting. So no matter what, it's impossible to get a "perfect exposure"? As in, there is only a perfect exposure for a shot, not a platonic idea of a perfect exposure for every color situation.

As the white husband of a brown wife, let me tell you, group selfies where I'm the only white guy in the picture invariably leave me washed out. Sometimes I make a point to expose for my face and everyone else darkens too much.

The problem is not only exposure, but how to fit the complete luminance range in the very limited emission range of a screen or a photograph after capture, and the answer is definitely "not linearly".

Actually with film it wasn't that straightforward:

"In the early days of color film, the color balance of the film’s processing chemicals were made with the primary consumer market in mind–which, at the time, was predominately light skinned individuals. “For many decades, chemicals that would bring out various reddish, yellow, and brown tones were largely left out,” explains the video’s narrator."

source: http://www.diyphotography.net/history-of-how-film-camera-tec...

The video has some pretty interesting details.

You want to be sure other skin tones are right, too.

You do that by holding swatches of known colors and calibrating that way.

If you have say mixed race models or models of a race you're not familiar with, it would be worse than useless. Somebody with east asian features but western european skin tone would throw off an entire movie.

Yes, but it's not as though western Europeans all have exactly the same skin tone either - you can still make the wrong assumption. I think the idea would be to have multiple people with different skin tones so that you can check that they all look ok.

Reminds me of an older nerds comment about the NTSC Color TV standard .

AKA 'Never The Same Color'

The techs at the TV station would adjust the transmission so skin tones 'looked right' and left it at that.

Even when it isn't what the lab guys were expecting:

http://www.startrek.com/article/trouble-keeping-her-green

No article can be complete nowadays unless it makes some soft virtue signal about how racist we all used to be.

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