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Advances In Cinema Tech Overcoming a Strange Racial Divide
barlevg writes "Since the birth of film, shooting subjects of darker complexion has been a technical challenge: light meters, film emulsions, tone and color models, and the dynamic range of the film itself were all calibrated for light skin, resulting in dark skin appearing ashy and washed-out. Historically, filmmakers have used workarounds involving "a variety of gels, scrims and filters." But now we live in the age of digital filmmaking, and as film critic Ann Hornaday describes in the Washington Post, and as is showcased in recent films such as "12 Years a Slave," "Mother of George" and "Black Nativity," a collection of innovators have set to work developing techniques in lighting, shooting and post-processing designed to counteract century-old technological biases as old as the medium itself."
Is this for real? Hollywood produced plenty of Italian American superstars, as well as Latinos. How did Bollywood manage?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Anyone else remember when HP's webcam face login program refused to recognize black people and it had to be recalled and altered? This totally reminds me of that. Classic HP.
Microsoft might be interested in some of these techniques for their Kinect.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
shooting subjects of darker complexion has been a technical challenge
This is slightly true, but no more so than any other dark object.
...were all calibrated for light skin
No, not really. The very first color on a Macbeth chart(in use for decades) represents dark skin.
..eh?
- this is now getting seriously PC stupid, assuming it hasn't already gone somewhere beyond that stage.
Film is not "biased" towards people with "light skin." Quite frankly, I don't see how any visual medium that's designed to capture an accurate colour spectrum could be racially biased.
I think this whole article is a trollish attempt to inject a "racial issue" where there is none.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
. . .Lilies of the Field was done in B & W.
That, and there was less competition for cinematography Oscar bestieness.
Japanese camera companies' digital cameras have often had trouble with European skin tones. The reason being that all digital cameras embellish colours and their development subjects were Japanese. One particular example was Canon, whose cameras were making faces ruddy for years until recently.
"shooting subjects of darker complexion has been a technical challenge"
He-he-he, lynching us too is a challenge, albeit a legal one.
Nuh-uh!
- tldr, and all that -however, fuck RTFA, and keep on keeping fighting the effing power, furthur, dood!
eh, where were we again, exactly?
(sorry, but, OP invites this stuff, IMO)
Now they have the technology to make Teal'c look good without making all the white people look like ghosts.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
So you fight it with plagiarism? Your post was a verbatim copy of a 2010 rant by By Solomon Comissiong
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
With the same malapropisms and spelling errors? Or did you not really mean verbatim?
You shouldn't be a photographer or work in the film industry.
Every (competent) photographer knows that camera film and sensors have a very limited way of "seeing" compared to the human eye.
Your eyes have an incredible dynamic range (the range of light you can see at any one time) that cameras cannot hope to match, at least not currently. That's why you see no stars in the moon landing photos; and why you *can* see stars and the moon simultaneously when you look up at the night sky.
The funny thing is that film (negative, not slide) has *more* dynamic range and exposure latitude than digital. Getting differing subjects exposed correctly is mostly in the lighting, which has always been possible.
This reminds me of when they were developing the original pilot for the original "Star Trek" series. They wanted to know how the green-skinned Orion slave-girl would look when filmed. They covered her in green makeup and shot some test footage. It came back from the lab with normal pink European flesh tones. So they tried darker makeup. Still pink. They tried the darkest, densest makeup they could find. Still pink. It turned out that the lab was oh-so-helpfully "correcting" the color for them. I think this speaks volumes as to the article's premise...
There was a hack in some early NTSC TV sets which actually did have a bias for white people. NTSC has a luminance channel and two color channels, which are converted to three color channels to drive the CRT. Because the color channel bandwidth was limited and the signal level wasn't that consistent, some early color receivers had a special case for "skin color". When the two color channels, treated as a vector, were in the "skin color cluster region", they were pulled to that value, which was set for "white" people. Even if the other colors were way off, the skin colors would be consistent.
But that hack went out with vacuum tubes.
No, seriously, look at what we're doing. Look look! We're making it less racist so we're obviously not racist! That's why we talk about race so much regarding things that have nothing to do with race. We really have a need to make sure you don't think we're racist. Film is biased! Bias is so pervasive that everything is racist! Just not us! Everything but us!
I should know better than to respond to this post, but I just have to say it: That last story cracked me up!
I've never heard of any difficulties shooting black actors, period, and I've been a film buff since the the late 70s.
Is the author making this up to add a "racism" argument where none exists?
If this was really true, why haven't we heard the of the difficulties in shooting darker-skinned Indian actors, Hispanic actors, etc.?
My bullshit sense is tingling, because this is literally the first time in my life such an argument has ever been stated. I can't think of a single film where any of the darker skinned actors looked remotely washed-out otherwise distorted, unless we're talking about very low-budget movies where EVERYTHING looked bad.
Whenever a new movie is about to come out, there is an stupid amount of press related to the movie.
The 100 million dollar promotion budget seems to also make a little bit of its way to slashdot.
I can't be bothered... but you can look for yourself
http://yourworldnews.org/blog/?p=3689
Sure, these days they're dying slightly less pointless deaths, but the "token X guy" (generally black, but certainly not white) still seems to exist in a lot of movies. The last one that got me was X-Men Origins. Who's the first "newbie" mutant to bike it (for the team, of course), but Darwin, the single black guy.
I have a hard time believing that this sort of crap is just coincidental, and I'm white. Until being a "minority" actor in a AAA-1 movie isn't a bit part or the equivalent to a sci-fi red shirt, I doubt that a few extra filters and a "cleaner" picture are going to help much.
Having worked in post for many years, it's actually common to have to light darker skin with opposing colours. Watch anything from the 90s and you'll notice orange one side, blue the other. The problem is that film is a log format, the detail is in the brighter spectrums.
This isn't hard to deal with in isolation, but the moment there's white and black on screen at once it's a lighting headache.
In other words, they've gotten better at color correction. I worked on color correction for Walt Disney's Heroes Work Here campaign and I spent a long time agonizing over the woman in the stadium. It wasn't because of any kind of racial bias, it wasn't because of any kind of subconscious decisions. It's entirely because of shooting technique and conditions. The problem was making her skin exhibit contrast against the dark background without making her dress completely blown out.
It was a combination of the fact that she wasn't shot with enough lighting to make her stand out against the background, and that digital imaging sensors don't have as wide a range of exposure (dynamic range) as the human eye.
The problem is even further than that. When you get into psychovisual enhancements to allow lossy compression to better do its job that means discarding details, and details we least often notice happen to be in the darker portions of luminance. What's needed there is some sort of more intelligent encoding system that can differentiate foreground objects from background objects.
Rawr
The film bias is real. The January 2006 issue of Popular Photography featured an article about different film emulsions sold outside the U.S. that better capture skin tones that are darker/different than caucasian. They shot a black model using Kodak Portra 160NC and Kodak Ultima 100, a film "tailor-made for shooting Indian weddings." They used the same lighting, adjusting exposure only for the 2/3 stop difference in film speed. I quote:
The negatives were dramatically different. Ultima 100 produced visibly more detail in Dionne Audain's skin than did Portra 160NC, especially on the shadowed side of her face. In matched prints, not only was that shadow more open, but there was a much better sense of texture in her hair and black sweater. The surprising thing is that, despite Ultima 100's higher minimum density, it seemed to have more snap overall than Portra 160NC.
classic Blacksplotation films! Yassah!
Anyone else remember when HP's webcam face login program refused to recognize black people and it had to be recalled and altered? This totally reminds me of that. Classic HP.
You probably think that is proof of racism, but it is not.
If you have very dark complexion your skin will reflect light less and the resulting image will have low contrast and be in a high noise area. Couple that with a crap camera and poor lighting and you basically have a face detection and face identity problem from hell. In my company we worked on it for years and even with great cameras and great ligthing, the contrast problem alone turned out to make not only face detection cumbersome but face identity basically impossible. I am sure that technology has advanced much since then but there is no denying that black faces have less contrast to work with and thus cause a greater burden on the algorithms.
While HP may not have done the greatest job, and (speculation) failed to have a representative sample of the population during development may be true, we had the same problem and even renowned research institutions we were collaborating with laughed at some of the images we used for training - there was simply not enough contrast in the faces to get accurate results.
My favorite film is Kodak Ektar 100, the modern wonder-film. It has super-fine grain, scans great, and produces vivid in-your-face colors. It makes everything look good -- except white people! Caucasians generally come out looking pink and sunburned. Well, I guess that's why Kodak sell Portra film too.
Sorry to see that your account has apparently been hacked, HK. Or some malware is messing with your posting ability. Suggest you change your passwords and whatnot...
Just don't install 'mycleanpc'.
I don't read AC A human right
You're lucky HK screwed up, or I'd have never seen this. I know that there's a whole rainbow of colors in Africa, which is why I put 'straight from Africa black' in quote marks. The idea is to give readers a vision of the color in question, not to quibble about the pigmentation range of the continent.
I don't read AC A human right
First off, film was *not* designed to capture an accurate spectrum. If you took a picture of bouquet of flowers, and compared the spectrum of that image to the original's, the spectra would be quite different even if the color reproduction was perfect.
That's because color isn't a physical property like wavelength. It is a physiological response to wavelength. This sounds like splitting hairs, but it's not. Two different mixes of wavelengths can produce the same perceived color if they stimulate the cones in human eyes the same way. Birds and reptiles have *four* primary colors instead of three (we know this by studying the cones in their eyes). By avian standards mammals are color-blind to colors we obviously don't even have names for. If they looked at our "accurate" color pictures, it wouldn't look right to them at all. Starlings that look black to us might appear a deep -- something to other birds.
Second, while the goal for film might be to reproduce the same color response in humans as if they were looking at the original scene (although that's debatable, e.g. Kodachrome, Technicolor), in engineering an objective is only as good as the tests you measure success with. Up until the 1990s, movie studios shot images of models (the human kind) holding color strips to help film technicians to establish a consistent color balance (link with "China Girl" pictures). These were inserted into the prints so you could check that the print was developed properly. But since models in these pictures were *white*, the test only ensured good results for white skin.
Finally film is far from perfect in reproducing human perception. How many times have you seen an amazing scene, shot a picture, and have the picture come out "meh"? You have to understand the properties of the recording and playback media, and consciously take them into account to get a controlled result.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"For the first hundred years of cinema, when images were captured on celluloid and processed photochemically, disregard for black skin and its subtle shadings was inscribed in the technology itself, from how film-stock emulsions and light meters were calibrated, to the models used as standards for adjusting color and tone.'
I don't have the time for this dreck but I find it amusing that the suggestion is film was designed to make white people look good, it must really suck to be black and see conspiracy everywhere.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Have you never seen a civil war photo of a black soldier? Or the group shot of the Tuskegee airmen? Or To Sir With Love?
I have observed many black actors appear on film and video with bloodshot eyes - that is, their eyes appear to have prominent blood vessels. Perhaps it's because blood vessels in the eyes are simply more noticable in black actors, but I'd suspect that it's a side effect of the lighting and filtering changes photographers are making. If photographers are bumping up color channels to make black faces appear less grey, a special emphasis on turning this off in the eyes might make this effect disappear. I could imagine adding a feature to photo and video processing, similar in principle to red-eye removal, that reduces redness within eyes to make the blood vessels less prominent.
The simple truth here is that film technology was designed to capture white people. No optical technology is perfect and therefore you have to make it work for the most likely subject. All the article is saying is that digital cinematography gives film makers the ability to adjust the image for people of color. It has absolutely nothing to do with physics. The human eye sees completely different than a camera therefore sensors, film stocks, light meters, and standard lighting techniques all had to be calibrated to render proper images. When faced with a choice the designers were more likely to error on the side of Caucasian. This effect is most evident in consumer technology were the users often have little control over the final image. Consumer image products do a terrible job rendering people of color. It really isn't racism it's getting the job done.
The situation is obvious: even technology is racist. Indeed the very fact of a white man inventing moving pictures rather than Ogoomboo Edisonji from Nigeria is proof of racism. Nothing can ever change that.