Speaker 1: Going back decades, cameras have centered light skin, a bias that's crept into many of our modern digital imaging products and algorithms, especially because they're not being tested with diverse enough groups of people. Photos are symbols of what and who matter to us collectively. So it's critical that they work equitably for everyone, especially communities of co color like mine, who haven't always been seen fairly by these tools this year. One of the advances in pixel six and Google photos that we're most excited about is real tone. [00:00:30] We knew that building for the community meant we had to acknowledge our own gaps and learn from the folks who know this issue best. So we started by working with image experts like photographers, cinematographers, and who are celebrated for their beautiful and accurate imagery of communities of color. We asked them to test our cameras in a wide range of tough lighting conditions. And in the process, they took thousands of portraits that made our image data sets 25 times more diverse to look more like the world around us. They worked directly with our engineers telling [00:01:00] them what was already working well and where we needed to do better, to make sure our images highlighted the nuances of all skin tones equally. And they kept it real
Speaker 2: When they had a really white background on the back or a light or anything like they just looked very washed
Speaker 3: Out and you know, it's a beautiful pink sunset. You, there's no reason why she
Speaker 4: Should be looking this green for this. I would love it if the camera, if this cam, if this picture was
Speaker 5: Darker, the [00:01:30] second image, absolutely not. It sh no, it was just, the color was, everything was just ashy. If
Speaker 6: There isn't adequate light, the skin can sometimes skew a little gray or desaturated when you take a picture of someone and they look gray. Like that's not, you know,
Speaker 7: That's not good. It negated the blue. It like washed out the blue that would've had. The, the brown hue show up more in his skin.
Speaker 4: I think that the instinct is suddenly if somebody is not used to shooting darker skin [00:02:00] tones, the, the instinct is to just be let you know, to shoot them much brighter. And it's just like, no, there really is like, we should appreciate and really sort of work toward like all the different hues and all the different tonalities.
Speaker 7: How do we make sure that when someone grabs that phone and it takes a photo of them, they see themselves,
Speaker 4: It should be that everybody just kind of looks like they look.
Speaker 1: All of that wisdom helped us make a more [00:02:30] equitable camera first to make a great portrait. Your phone has to see a face in the picture and our experts helped us improve our face detection models. So the camera sees you as you are from there, we improved our auto white balance tuning to better reflect the beauty of your skin tone. And we improved our auto exposure tuning to make sure your skin looks like you not unnaturally darker or brighter. They also inspired our teams to make advances like algorithmically, reducing stray light that can make darker skin tones look [00:03:00] ashy or washed out and making nightside portraits, less blurry for folks like me. All of these changes are part of real tone improvements that led these experts to vote pixel six, as the most inclusive camera available in a blind test, across top smartphone cameras, they rated pixel six's camera as best in rendering skin tone, brightness, richness, and detail for people of color.
Speaker 1: Google photos will also have real tone baked into its auto enhanced editing feature. So you always feel seen [00:03:30] from the instant, you take a photo to the moment you edit and share it, but this mission goes beyond Google apps. Real tone will improve the camera performance for photo photos and videos. And third party apps like Snapchat, because feeling seen shouldn't be limited to just one tool or company this fall. We partnered with the New York times to see how some of the most compelling contemporary image makers put real tone to work in their own art. Let's take a look
Speaker 8: For decades. You know, been generalizations [00:04:00] made about people of color in imagery and just how they've been shown and show up in their portrayals. It, it white washes our history in some ways, image technology was calibrated for white skin, and that meant that the variety and spectrum of colors had to therefore conform to that calibration picture progress is a campaign created by the T brand, our content studio at New York times, advertising in partnership with Google. The campaign for us is an opportunity to literally lay the groundwork of opening the dialogue around [00:04:30] what does it look like to have a more equitable and visually representative future? So we put the pixel six camera in the hands of bipo creators. We felt as though getting their unique perspective of on image equity was very important. Kennedy Carter joined us on this effort. We were so excited to work with her. What we love about Kennedy is that her work expresses and really captures and elicits really unique questions around what is pride and power and compassion and poise mean in the black community.
Speaker 9: It's [00:05:00] important to think of images as facts, whether it's an image of your family and your grandma cooking dinner, or it's something like a protest. This will be a point of reference for a very long time. I found that a lot of my sitters looked good no matter where they were. And that was just straight out the camera and people were on set, looking at the image I output. And they were like, wow, this looks really great. If you're an artist, you should go into every community with the intention of trying to elevate a voice [00:05:30] and make people feel heard and make people feel good and make people feel proud.
Speaker 8: This will be a game changer for sure. There's something very empowering about being able to see yourself as you see your else to see the nuances that make us all unique. Being able to know that you take a photo with a group of friends and everyone is represented equally. All of their beautiful hues are showing up in the same photo. It's our truth in our hands.
