Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucasgonze | Hacker News Reader

You're precisely missing the point. There is a new feature to better capture non-white skin tones. Those photos are to illustrate a product benefit.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23RealTone&src=typed_query&f=t...

View on HN

Yeah, the explanation is literally right above the pictures: "Portraits on Pixel represent the nuances of different skin tones for all people beautifully and authentically."

This may be obvious to the previous two commenters but I want to specifically add that a lot of camera tech is not great capturing darker skinned people. This has been an issue perhaps as long as the camera has been around. Clearly google did some work to address that and want to show it on the page.

I'm going to assume that because the copy just says "skin tones" and doesn't specifically call out darker skin the gp (or whatever the first commenter is) is confused by what they're seeing and reading.

Are they talking about how they've improved skin tone representation for all people, in which case I would expect more variation of skin tone in those photos, or are they saying that they improved representation of skin tones which contain more melanin? They literally said "all people," but I assume they actually mean the latter based on the representative photos.

They already took fantastic pictures of light skinned folks.

I disagree. I hate taking photos with my phone when I have the opportunity to use a my full-frame Sony camera. It's also very easy to mess up skin tones in tricky lighting situations, whether we're talking about light or dark-skinned people. Having multiple temperatures of light in the frame is probably the biggest issue (e.g., window light plus light from an incandescent bulb). It can really unbalance the rendering of skin tone.

I did a bit of searching just now and found that Google is calling this update "Real Tone." https://store.google.com/intl/en/discover/realtone/

From what I can tell, they have likely improved things for people of all skin colors, but probably moreso for those with darker skin due to increased focus on ML training. They include a person with fairly light skin on that page in comparison to the product page.

Do I really have to specify "for a phone"? Obviously you can get better pictures with a $2000 full frame camera...

> to better capture non-white skin tones

The copy on the page itself seems to disagree with you

> Portraits on Pixel represent the nuances of different skin tones for *all people* beautifully and authentically.

(Emphasis mine)

There does seem to be a discrepancy between the copy saying "all people" and the photos above that paragraph only including individuals with darker skin.

Edit: I'm acknowledging that there are photos of white males elsewhere on the page, but I think my comment's parent is specifically talking about that one section?

Unfortunately, since there are more than 7B people alive on earth and several more billion people who are dead, it would be quite difficult to feature literally all people in the copy. So they, like absolutely every product marketing copy that has ever featured people in the history of everything, included the people for which the actual product featured is targeting.

Aside from that, you can also infer from the negative view that the copy is implying that other phones do not represent the nuances of all people, which is the reason that they said it to begin with.

But you knew that already, didn’t you?

Maybe because it already took great photos of white people?

Yeah this is probably the best explanation. Elsewhere on the page you can see examples of photos of lighter skin-toned individuals, and when viewed holistically – both photos and copy – this particular section is actually trying to communicate that the camera can capture well _darker_ skin tones. But I guess it's rude to specifically say it that way, and more "inclusive" to simply say "all people".

Did you go to the page I linked to? That is only one section of many photos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com