As a man of color, I’m really looking forward to RealTone on the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro

I’ll never forget: it was my senior year in high school, I was getting ready to take my girlfriend to senior prom, and graduation was just around the corner!  I recall that time in my life with genuine fondness because there was a real and palpable level of excitement that followed me around everywhere that spring.  In just a few short months, I would be leaving home as a newly-minted adult and attending my first choice college.   I. Could. Not. Wait!!!  I was mentally in this sort of zen zone where I was walking on clouds every day and almost nothing could drag me down.  Well, almost nothing.  

A few weeks before the prom, we got our senior photos back and I recall looking at mine with my mother. I was wearing a new suit she bought me for the occasion, I had a fresh, new haircut, shaved face, and I’d done EVERYTHING YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO to look good for your senior photo.  And yet, here I was in the photo, looking the opposite.  In fact, I looked bizarre to my eyes.  My forehead was shining like a lighthouse beacon, the contrast of the photo was overdone, and I looked entirely alien to myself.  I was beyond mortified!  

Look, this has nothing to do with me being attractive or not; I totally get that plenty of people take awkward school photos.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  I was simply hoping to appear as the best version of myself, and this wasn’t it.  Some weeks later, when I got a hold of my yearbook, it really hit me how poor-quality my picture was compared to my classmates.  What was the difference?  Out of 100 graduating seniors, I was one of three black students, and I was the only one with really dark skin.

Let me first say that I don’t want to overtly call race into this story.  This is primarily an issue about the physicality of dark skin complexion, though race does influence the origins and complexity of the problem.  In terms of my experience, I was on the receiving end of jokes about my senior photo from friends of all ethnicities.  I had been relentlessly teased as a child about my complexion, but as a high schooler, I had developed into a much more resilient person. My family had been very affirming of my physical appearance, even as I was teased at school, so I really can’t say that I had any issues with how I looked.  I did not suffer from self-hatred or bad self-esteem because of my skin complexion.  

I did, however, hate to take photos.  Not all photos, mind you.  Somehow, the Polaroids my mom snapped at family events turned out well enough.  But any school photo or class photo was awful, especially if the photographer was not black (and sometimes even if they were).  It’s like photographers didn’t know what to do with me, so they just used the flash and cranked the contrast.  The result was always utter disappointment, but my senior photo was really a special level of awful.  I looked sort of like a caricature of myself; like I was wearing blackface with a white shine emanating from my forehead, eyes and teeth.  

However, the problems were different in group photos.  In those, I was generally just washed out, likely because the color calibrations for a group of lighter-skinned people just didn’t apply for the lone dark-skinned individual in the frame.  My junior prom date had very pale skin, as I recall.  Our photo together made her look amazing, while I was simply unidentifiable, as if she was embracing a shadow.  My senior prom photo turned out slightly better, but only because my girlfriend was black, so the photographer clearly adjusted to take a picture of two dark-skinned people.  The end result was that we were both sort of washed out.  Go figure.

My dislike of my own photographed image continued well into college and beyond.  It wasn’t until I saw my wedding pictures – taken by someone who specialized in photographing people of color – that I even realized I could actually take a good picture.  But these were taken by a wedding photographer who charged hundreds of dollars.  It felt as if the world of regular-people-photography was hopeless.  

I distinctly recall an awkward moment at my old job a couple of years ago where several of us were asked to move in close for a group photo at a social function.  A female co-worker who had a similar skin tone made immediate eye contact with me.  We knew how this was going to go.  That same old feeling came back, and I was suddenly back in high school looking at my senior picture with dread.  Even as digital and phone photography got better, I continued to feel an aversion to having my picture taken. As a tech enthusiast, I initially thought that this situation was something that technology could surely improve.  I have been #teamgoogle since the beginning and have always rocked a Nexus or Pixel device. With every iteration, I have seen the camera get smarter and more feature-rich with things like night-sight and astrophotography, but still lacking the simple ability to get skin tones right on any photo of me or someone who looks like me.

But something changed in the spring of 2021.  My wife and I were vaccinated, the pandemic seemed to be receding (boy was everybody wrong about that!), and much like my senior year in high school, hope was again in the air.  I was watching Google I/O as one does, and one of the speakers mentioned how they were aware that their camera, famously known for its software algorithms and AI smarts, was not very good at taking photos of people with dark skin.  What?  Was I dreaming?  Did they say what I thought they just said?

Yep, they totally did!  And then they said that Google was going to FIX THE PROBLEM!  My heart soared for a moment and then I realized – oh, wait a second – this was Google we’re talking about.  Sometimes the company I love has a tendency to get out too far over their skis.  Promises of future features arriving in the “coming weeks” may – in reality – show up years later or not at all.  Google has a habit of over-promising and under-delivering.  I honestly thought we would never hear anything about it again, and I sort of forgot about the whole announcement.  

Enter Pixel 6

Until the October 19th Pixel 6 launch.  I know that most people watching this event were all about the new phone, but I always enjoy hearing about the services and technology that live under the hood.  Yes, the camera has a bazillion megapixels, but it’s Google’s machine learning that is the secret sauce.  About halfway through the announcement, Google got deep into the camera features, and again my ears perked up when I heard the phrase “RealTone”.  Here was the feature promised at I/O, rolling out on a phone just months after being promised!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGZx0RrL-ow

Going into more detail than they did during the spring event, Google again identified and clarified the problem: the imaging software and algorithms “were not being tested with diverse enough groups of people”.  

In a way, this has always been the problem, even before digital photography.  My senior picture photographer likely hadn’t taken pictures of enough non-white people to know what to do with me.  It was a data issue at its core, and Google’s solution was really rooted in casting a wider net to gather more of the data they needed. They showed actual examples of brown-skinned people being photographed color-accurately, partnered with real photographers who were trained in this work, and got insight from people of color in the tech industry who talked about the same issues I have felt ever since I was a child.

Photos are symbols of what and who matter collectively to us.

Florian Koenigsberger, Google Product Marketing Manager

Look, I am not saying that I know this feature is going to be good or even that I know the camera on the phone itself will be good.  But for once it feels like I, and people who look like me, are being seen as equally-important to what is quite simply our collective record of the faces and bodies we deem of value. My daughter, who inherited my skin complexion is 11 years old, and she is part of this new generation of kids that will be photographed more than any other in the history of the planet.  I can’t fully express how joyful and hopeful it makes me feel to think that the odds are good she will be able to look at future pictures and see the best version of herself reflected back at her.