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."

Comments

For real?

[oldhack]

Is this for real? Hollywood produced plenty of Italian American superstars, as well as Latinos. How did Bollywood manage?

Re:For real?

[dwywit]

Sounds unlikely to me - although some films were produced to "enhance" skin tones. Kodak had a specialised film made for weddings and portraits, and I can't remember seeing anything other than caucasians in the example brochures. You can enhance any part of the spectrum you want, but enhancing caucasian skin tones would negatively affect other parts of the spectrum. Besides, it's a creative decision as to how a film should "look", so it's largely up to the director, art department, and editor what the finished product looks like. You can have blue & orange (the current fad), or wash it all out a la 70's westerns - there's lots of ways to influence the final product - choice of emulsion, choice of lighting, and choice of post-processing, to name a few.

Re:For real?

[gl4ss]

But isn't this technique just another "how things should look on film" approach? I mean, often the white skintones aren't natural either on purpose. leading to the difference in police lockup photos of celebs vs. what they look on film(and makeup too but that's part of the workflow).

I didn't know this "divide" was there and I've known some dark, dark skinned people and seen photos and film of them.. so this new-old divide seems like a marketing ploy to me, "see blacks the way they really are! first time on film!"

Re:For real?

[SuricouRaven]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButNotTooBlack

Re:For real?

[stenvar]

You can enhance any part of the spectrum you want, but enhancing caucasian skin tones would negatively affect other parts of the spectrum.

For color, it's not a question of "enhancing" or "negatively affecting"; it's simply a question of how the spectrum is mapped into color and what kind of palette people prefer for skin. Nor is there a big difference between Caucasian and other skin tones: it's the same two pigments that matter in all cases, melanin and hemoglobin. But I don't think this is about color anyway.

It's more likely that cinematographers simply found dark skin tones difficult to light: you either lose details in the dark areas or you blow out the light ones. Losing detail in dark areas looks more natural than blowing out light areas, because that's what human eyes do. Furthermore, even in person, it's harder to read facial expressions of dark skin tones under bad lighting, so this isn't really a "bias" of film but more a reflection of reality.

Incidentally, brochures for both Kodak Portra and Fujicolor Pro (both "portrait films") show Africans and Latinos.

Re:For real?

[Charliemopps]

My wifes a photographer, she does simple stuff like family portraits, the occasional wedding, etc...

I'm decent with Photoshop so I post-process all her work. I can make you look like a zit faced kid, wrinkled old grandfather, over tanned beach bum, whatever...

But a few years ago we adopted our son, and he's black. Touching up our own photos is no-longer nearly as easy. Pretty much everything you do to make a white persons skin look better makes a black person look near death. Getting black skin to show up correctly makes the whites in the picture look very pale and anemic.

Re:For real?

[PopeRatzo]

Bingo. The racial divide in Indian culture is not significantly less than in the United States.

hilarious

[slashmydots]

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.

Re:hilarious

[obarthelemy]

Oh my. I remember Better of Ted's "the good news is: our security system is NOT racist, because it doesn't see blacks" episode, but never had an inkling it was based in reality.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/better-off-ted-racial-sensitivity,71599/

Re:hilarious

[Mitchell314]

A bit off topic, but it's a shame that show was cancelled.

Nonsense

[msobkow]

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.

Re:Nonsense

[janimal]

Agreed. Implying a racial bias here is a crock. If film is racially biased, so are our eyes. Specifically, when I'm driving at night in a certain predominantly indian country, the poor bastards on the side of the road wearing black with dark skin are friggn hard to see. Clearly this has to do with my eyes being biased against dark clothed and skinned poor people.

If you want to solve the dark skin problem in shooting pictures, you have to develop some fantastic dynamic range on your capture device. Modern DSLRs are better than film ever was, but you still should do a bit of post processing to bring out the shadows. Perhaps NOW is the time to "racially tune" photography, since it became at all possible.

Re:Nonsense

[Samantha Wright]

Gamma. The difference between a light object in full light and a light object in shadow is greater than the difference between a dark object in light and a dark object in shadow. Human eyes adjust automatically across the range and trick you into thinking the shading difference is more normal, but the gamma curve on a camera exacerbates the difference. This is why totally black fabric appears to be slimming; your eyes can't pick out the shape as well and you're left with just the silhouette. It's more or less the same phenomenon as in HDR photography.

Re:Nonsense

[GodfatherofSoul]

Did you read the article? Or, like most Slashdotters are you spouting off based on your uninformed "gut" instincts. The article is spelling out for you how black skin has traditionally been harder to film for tangible, technical reasons which required extra work for directors to address. How many directors do you think want to have interns smearing Black actors with vaseline between shots? This has obviously let directors to say "f it" throughout Hollywood's history. This has nothing to do with the "reverse racism" rants you hear on daytime radio.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

The error in your comment lies in the second clause - "designed to capture an accurate colour spectrum"

Very few film stocks were designed to be accurate; most were designed to be pleasing.

Many were designed with a certain colour profile or palette in mind. Some very general examples: Kodak films usually had a red/yellow bias, making things in a dreary, grey, northern climate look more saturated, at the expensive of making vivid colourful things in a tropical environment look cartoonish rainbow vomit, other films, like velvia, over saturated all the colours, and crunch all the shadows into a deep black, so sunsets would appear breathtakingly beautiful.

Nearly all of these types of film took into account that 90% of the time, they would be shooting people - so they had to make skintone look good. But they only really designed it for white skin tones.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a phrase, for years, nay decades, used among colorists, video engineers, camera operators and lighting designers/directors, to describe human subjects of significantly dark and contrasting skintone: LRP = Low Reflectance Personnel. It wasn't/isn't racial, it was/is descriptive without being so. All skin tones, regardless of race have their challenges...for instance the same 1/4 cto filter I use for some black actors to warm the blue skin cast is the same filter I use for white actors with too much magenta pigment.

The writer of the article, besides trying to get her race card stamped, seems to be hugely ignorant of the industry in general and the technology used in filmaking then and now - it's one thing to decry (as it shoud be) the portrayals of blacks as "caricatures" (although what do you say about cartoonish white guys like Jim Carey, Arnold Schwarzenegger and our pal, Larry The Cable Guy), and the use of white actors in black-face. It's quite another to make the claim that the industry as a whole discrimated against blacks and people of color by rigging the technology. Ain't nobody got time for that - or, as the Mob would say, "there's no percentage in it." Apparantly the author has no concept of this industry, which is all about making money, and, as we all know, comes only in green, gold and silver.

Back when the motion picture studio moguls (and their Mob financiers) saw that talkies were all the rage, studios invested heavily in the best sound technology money could buy, and made it all back on "the musical." Al Jolson may have been in black-face, but Lena, Ida, Dorothy and Pearly Mae weren't, and a lot of the sound technology from Westrex, RCA and Siemans was created to capture their subtle and resonate vocal range, not belters like Jolson.

Now that HDTV and digital distribution is all the rage, they're again investing and developing technology to exploit the market. In this case, as better processor, sensor and lens technology comes into the market, less use of color correction in lighting will be needed, ergo less labor costs for technicians in production or post. It's all about the Benjamins, man...if it makes it simpler to shoot dark skinned actros, then I predict you'll be seeing a return of the "blacxploitation" film...as long as there's a market for it.

Seriously, quoting an assistant professor from Howard (that is renown for it's film school - not) isn't exactly a qualified source or proof of "discriminating" by white man's technology. Additionally, the alleged quote from Steve (I wasn't there, but I saw it as a kid in the theater) McQueen isn't valid if it's attempting to make the racial case. In the 1960's you had limited choices for film stock and even less if you wanted to shoot at night. You had to light everything with big Brute carbon arc lamps or risk looking like it was shot in a closet...and those suckers generate heat. So, of course everyone was sweating - black, white, actor, crew - it's not like today where we use led, hmi and xenon lights that are far more efficient and cooler than the old 220v carbon arcs.

Oh and, by the way, the "vaseline" on the skin of dark persons trick? Been using it and teaching it for years, and it works on white skin too...baby oil is better for females, but really, anything that'll cause the skin to reflect light...fashion shooters have been using it for years as well to highlight muscle tone and shape of faces and body parts. That trick is really to cause pop since, after all, we're really only shooting in 2d and need separation/contrast for detail - and the only way to get that when skin tone contrast/gamma is fighting you is to make the details shine and reflect.

And, for the record, as the line in Blazing Saddles goes: "Are we black? Yes, we are..." and I've been shooting film and video of folks who look like me for the last 50 years. And folks that look like you, too.

Not just black-vs-white

[shameless]

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...

Re:If you don't know how to balance lighting...

[luckymutt]

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.

Way easier said than done.
Sure film has a fantastic range, but pulling highlight detail and shadow detail has always been difficult in the final print. If properly exposed, all of that detail is in the negative, but getting them to both look good in the final print has never been an easy task, still photography or motion picture.
For still photography, the trick was in the darkroom where you could dodge and burn. In pre-digital, pre-photoshop, the approach was referred to as "expose for shadow, develop for highlights." In camera, the photographer would expose for the shadows, while in the darkroom, develop for the highlights. In a wedding portrait, for example, it would also include dodging the wedding dress to keep it from getting blown out, and burning the tux to try and get more shadow detail.
Such tricks were not available to motion picture, so they generally try and balance it in camera with a bias to highlights so they don't get blown out.

Forcing skin color in NTSC

[Animats]

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.

Ooh, fancy technology? Really?

[Kichigai Mentat]

... and post-processing designed to counteract century-old technological biases as old as the medium itself."

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.

It's real.

[kylemonger]

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.

Re:Uhh, what?

[Hognoxious]

White skin presumably means what Europeans have. With a bit of a tan is close to 18% reflectance.

This is the same as a grey card, but the reason is that lots of other things are this tone too - foliage, brick, weathered wood, old roads. It's also, on a log scale, the midpoint between the lightest and darkest tones film can show.

Article is a load of horsefeathers. Films are no more biased against black people than they are in favour of yetis.