Adobe's latest Lightroom presets are optimized for dark skin tones, but can they correct historical ethnic biases in photography?
Photography Masterclass | All about presets | Adobe Creative Cloud
Like “neutral” algorithms programmed by white computer programmers, photography has long favored white skin over black skin. In 2020, Twitter’s auto-cropping tool was caught ignoring non-white faces , but the history goes back much further than that.
Photographic film itself was optimized for pale skin tones. Digital cameras are much better, but much of that can be attributed to how they work rather than an attempt to capture darker skin better. So why has it taken so long to capture non-white faces properly in photographs?
"I guess back in the days of the movies, it was very different and there was a big difference between shooting dark and light skin tones. But nowadays, the idea that there's a big difference just isn't there anymore," headshot photographer Rafael Larin told Lifewire via email.
