| Cultural assumptions of photo editing software
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Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah has a fascinating post about how photo upload sites and image editing packages look to someone whose skin is dark and who is shooting in very bright sunlight. This is just an example of a broader theme in the post: "The Subtle Business of Software Localization," as Ethan puts it. Snippets:
The first thing I very quickly noticed: somehow all the photos that I uploaded to Yahoo Photos turned out darker than on Flickr (the services both resize uploaded photos). The photo-resizing algorithm used by Yahoo Photos was giving worse results. This was noticeable to me because a large number of photos featured darker-skinned people such as myself. The originals were fine and where there were lighter skin tones everything looked good, but with darker skintones, the resized photos were not so good.
...Thirdly, when retouching photos, the Quick Fix or Auto Correct options in Photoshop seemed tailored for lighter skintones so I was constantly having to do manual tweaking of my photos. Now this is not a big deal for a few photos and indeed it's fun to fiddle with photos but after a couple of hundred images, it gets tiresome. I found mysef longing for "smarter" recognition by the software or for at least, a nice 'dark skin' option that I could set in a preferences dialog.
[Technorati tags: koranteng localization flickr Global Voices]
Posted
by D. Weinberger at April 8, 2005 12:56 PM
Comments
David, I'm surprised you fell for this specious argument.
First, how does any optimizing software know that there are people in the picture? I'll stop right here, this is too stupid to waste the time trying to explain the gray scale.
But, I'm glad you've revealed the grand conspiracy of white folk to achieve world domination by messing with snapshots of people from the third world.
Posted by: Ricky Miracles | April 9, 2005 02:11 AM
A bit sensitive are we, Ricky?
Being more ignorant than most on the subject, boning up on the gray scale didn't save me from finding it plausible that consumer-oriented image processing would be oriented toward the majority of consumers, or surprising that Korenteng and Ethan would get equal and opposite impressons of its product on each others' respective continents.
Could you point me toward a source that explains why the problem they outline is bogus?
Posted by: johne | April 9, 2005 09:48 PM