Author Archives: Florian Koenigsberger

Open call: introducing Google’s Image Equity Fellowship

When you’re telling stories and building products for a community, it’s best to do that work alongside that community. That's the ethos behind Real Tone, our efforts to more accurately and beautifully represent people of color on Google Pixel 6 and in Google Photos. A key part of our work on Real Tone was our deep partnerships with image experts — including renowned photographers, cinematographers, colorists and directors — whose artistry has expanded our collective understanding of whose stories need to be told. This emphasis on community-driven storytelling is the foundation of our first Image Equity Fellowship, launching today.

The Image Equity Fellowship aims to support the next generation of image makers of color. This six-month, application-based program will award $20,000 in unrestricted funds, intimate mentorship and dedicated workshops with industry experts to each of the 20 selected early-career creators in the U.S. The creators will develop visual bodies of work that share urgent, untold stories of their communities with dignity and nuance. Fellows will also receive support from Google and our partners in exhibiting their completed projects in-person and online.

Our partners

We are partnering with three nonprofits which contribute to a more representatively diverse world of artists. Through print, online media and in-person events, Aperture connects the photo community and its audiences with the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas and with each other. For Freedoms is an artist collective that centers art and creativity as a catalyst for transformative connection and collective liberation. And FREE THE WORK’s global talent discovery community bridges the gap between opportunities and underrepresented emerging artists.

Our partners curated a selection of industry-celebrated mentors to guide the fellows: Lebanese filmmaker and photographer Ahmed Klink, American artist and 2016 Guggenheim Fellow Lyle Ashton Harris, photographer and documentarian Bee Walker and multi-hyphenate creative Mahaneela.

How to apply

Applications for the Image Equity Fellowship are now open through 11:59 pm Eastern on Friday, July 18 to all early-career artists who self-identify as a person of color, are based in the U.S. and are at least 18 years old. To learn more about the Fellowship and to apply, visit the website.

Read Article

Image equity: Making image tools more fair for everyone

As part of Google’s Product Inclusion efforts, our teams are building more equitable camera and imaging products for people of color.

Read Article

Read Article

Improving skin tone representation across Google

We're introducing a next step in our commitment to image equity and improving representation across our products.

Read Article

Image equity: Making image tools more fair for everyone

Pictures are a big part of how we see each other and the world around us, and historically racial bias in camera technology has overlooked and excluded people of color. That same bias can carry through in our modern imaging tools if they aren’t tested with a diverse group of people and inputs, delivering unfair experiences for people of color, like over-brightening or unnaturally desaturating skin. We acknowledge that Google has struggled in this area in the past, and are committed to continuing to improve our products accordingly. As part of Google’s Product Inclusion and Equity efforts, our teams are on a mission to build camera and imaging products that work equitably for all people, so that everyone feels seen, no matter their skin tone.

Pixel 6: A more equitable camera

  • A person photographs a group of six people sitting on and around a park bench.
  • A photographer takes a picture of a Black woman looking out a window.
  • A photographer lays on the ground to take a portrait of a family of four from below.

Building better tools for a community works best when they’re built with the community. For the new Pixel 6 Camera, we partnered with a diverse range of renowned image makers who are celebrated for their beautiful and accurate depictions of communities of color—including Kira Kelly, Deun Ivory, Adrienne Raquel, Kristian Mercado, Zuly Garcia, Shayan Asgharnia, Natacha Ikoli and more—to help our teams understand where we needed to do better. With their help, we've significantly increased the number of portraits of people of color in the image datasets that train our camera models. Their feedback helped us make the key improvements across our face detection, camera and editing products that we call Real Tone.

Let’s take a deeper look at how we approached these improvements:

  • In computational photography, making a great portrait depends on the camera’s ability to detect a face. We radically diversified the images that train our face detector to “see” more diverse faces in a wider array of lighting conditions.
  • Auto-white balance models help determine color in a picture. Our partners helped us make better decisions about how to render the nuances of skin for people of color.
  • Auto-exposure models help determine the brightness of an image. Feedback from our experts helped us ensure that our camera shows you as you are — not unnaturally darker or brighter.
  • Our teams noticed that stray light had a tendency to disproportionately wash out darker skin tones, so we developed and implemented an algorithm to reduce its effect in our images.
  • Blurriness in portraits is a consistent concern for people with darker skin tones, so our teams used the Tensor chip’s processing power to make our portraits sharper through motion metering, even in low light conditions.

It was important for us to be sure that our adjustments were resonant with our collaborators as well, and we’re proud that they rated Pixel 6’s rendering of skin tone, brightness, depth and detail as best for people of color in a device-agnostic survey comparing top smartphone cameras.

Google Photos: More nuanced auto enhancements

Our partners’ expertise also helped our teams improve Google Photos’ popular auto enhance feature, so you can achieve a beautiful, representative photo regardless of when you took the photo, or which device you used. The updated auto enhance is designed to improve your picture’s color and lighting with just a tap, and works well across skin tones. It will roll out in Google Photos across Android and iOS devices in the coming weeks.

A mission, not a moment

We’re committed to building a more equitable experience across all of our camera and image products. To improve the visibility of meeting participants, we recently launched automaticlighting adjustments in Google Meet, and tested it across a range of skin tones to ensure it works well for everyone. And our Research teams are identifying more inclusive ways to handle skin tone in AI systems, both in Google products and across the industry. We’ll continue to partner with experts, listen to feedback and invest in tools and experiences that work for everyone. Because everyone deserves to be seen as they are.

Learn more about our efforts on Real Tone at http://g.co/pixel/realtone.