cmfhsu

joined 1 year ago
[–] cmfhsu@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'll attest to most modern day cameras still being bad at exposing dark skin tones correctly.

Especially in the prosumer & professional camera world where intelligent exposure algorithms are kind of ignored, lighting, exposure, and white balance algorithms destroy dark skin tones. You have to very consciously & purposely ignore the primitive default algorithms to take any decent pictures of darker skinned people - it takes extra time you may not have or have not planned for (or might not even know how to compensate for if you've never had to take a great photo of a dark skinned person).

In fact, all my cameras from the late 2010s have facial recognition, but none of them reliably detect my dark skinned friend when the background light source is extremely bright (causing his face to become a black blob). Funny enough, the best way to accurately take a picture of his face seems to be to use the most primitive algorithm available called "center weighted average". This is the same algorithm used by my 70s camera with no electronics.

Phones are where this technology has made leaps and bounds in the last 5 years - the AI processing capability and massive online database of pictures have put phones miles ahead of traditional cameras for "no knowledge required" photography of dark skin tones.

[–] cmfhsu@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're right, but this article points out present-day women are still being coached to slow down, lower the pitch of their voices, and prevent being described as "shrill", despite advancements in technology.

I see this article as a half-and-half argument on gender biases in speech and on the way audio / broadcast technology still leans toward male voices, even with theoretically solved problems.

For example, the frequency response of lots of microphones still boost higher frequencies which may cause a "shrill" sounding female voice, even though the transmission medium can theoretically broadcast that voice losslessly (but still don't, for bandwidth's sake). This can be solved with a bit of AV sound engineering, but the article points out how limited this time & budget is.

I have personal experience with this - Taylor swifts voice transmitted via industry standard Bluetooth SBC codec is shrill to the point of pain for me in every car I've tried. A quick switch to a different Bluetooth codec or to an aux cable solves all problems for me.