Real Tone on Pixel 6 tries to make smartphone photography finally not suck for people of color

Google takes on historical racial bias in camera technology after admitting past failures

Google has just fully unveiled its latest flagship smartphones, and the Pixel 6 series comes with a number fascinating new software features to enhance the camera experience. As well as headline tools such as Magic Eraser and Face Deblur, there’s one feature that stands out as even more important — it’s called Real Tone, and it’s designed to deliver photographs that are fairer to everyone, no matter their skin tone.

Historically, camera technologies have done a disservice to people of color, over-brightening or unnaturally desaturating certain skin tones. You’d think this would be easy to solve with modern computational photography, but these problems have persisted. Google admits it hasn’t done enough in this area up to now, and Real Tone is its attempt to make amends as part of its wider Product Inclusion and Equity efforts.

Google has worked closely with a long list of celebrated photographers — including Kira Kelly, Deun Ivory, and Adrienne Raquel — to better understand what it takes to produce accurate images of people of color. The company has also made sure to increase the diversity of its datasets to better train its camera models so that the image processing on the new Pixel 6 and 6 Pro takes a good picture of every subject.

Some of the improvements Google has made to its camera software as part of Real Tone includes better face detection in a greater range of lighting conditions, refined auto-white balance models, and enhanced auto-exposure. Other imaging oddities such as stray light disproportionately washing out darker skin tones also had to be addressed. All-in-all, Google says it’s made great strides in this area, and we’ll hopefully see the results once Pixel 6 camera samples start to be shared.

Further to this, the Google Photos Auto Enhance feature is also getting Real Tone, so you can apply it to images you've taken with other smartphones. It'll roll out to Android and iOS devices over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for it.

To read more about how Google developed Real Tone, take a look at the blog post.

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