
Photography and racial bias - kwindla
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html
======
kwindla
I posted this, and definitely wasn't thinking of it as clickbait, or even as
controversial. As Dan says, I think this history is both intellectually
interesting and relevant to my work as an engineer, today.

Over time, as the technology of photography was invented and iteratively
improved, film formulations came to work better for taking photographs of
light-skinned people than of dark-skinned people. Inventors and engineers
didn't set out to disadvantage dark-skinned people specifically. But it
happened anyway.

In the relatively short history of commercial "AI", we've already seen
examples of machine learning systems that followed a similar development path.
Non-representative data sets[0], replicating existing bias[1], over-fitting
data sets to the point where the outcomes violate non-discrimination laws[2],
etc.

One way to help avoid making these mistakes is to think about how they were
made in the past, in other engineering contexts.

[0]-[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/the-u...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/the-
underlying-bias-of-facial-recognition-systems/476991/)
[1]-[https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17958784/ai-
recruiting-t...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/10/17958784/ai-recruiting-
tool-bias-amazon-report) [2]-[https://www.vox.com/2019/3/21/18275746/facebook-
settles-ad-d...](https://www.vox.com/2019/3/21/18275746/facebook-settles-ad-
discrimination-lawsuits)

~~~
danieltillett
It is not just photography, even in real life under low light conditions it
can be hard to read the facial expressions of dark skinned people.

~~~
mirimir
True. So maybe skin darkening would be more practical than CV Dazzle, because
it wouldn't be so unusual. Horrible legacy and PR, though.

Anyway, I suspect that was an evolutionary advantage. For hunting in forest
and savannah, to hide in shadows. The human rootstock was black, I gather. And
lighter skin evolved where soft UV was limiting for vitamin D synthesis.

But that's solvable with the right technology. Maybe something like getting
overall color value, and then tweaking color contrast. If we can do it in
astronomy, we can do it with people.

~~~
an_ko
I would guess that the evolutionary advantage of black skin was not primarily
camouflage. Tool-using humans of any colour can do that with mud and grass.

My bet is on UV tolerance. Black people have lower rates of skin cancer in the
US compared to whites.
[https://www.jaad.org/article/S0190-9622(05)02730-1/fulltext](https://www.jaad.org/article/S0190-9622\(05\)02730-1/fulltext)
(Mortality is higher in blacks, but that's because it's diagnosed at later
more severe stages.) The effect would have been far bigger when foraging and
hunting all day every day under the equatorial sun.

~~~
todd8
Or perhaps light skin was an evolutionary development as humans moved to
higher latitudes in order to obtain high enough levels of vitamin D. See [1]:
The evolutionary significance of vitamin D, skin pigment, and ultraviolet
light.

1\.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/1211435/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/1211435/)

------
jdietrich
Dark-skinned faces are inherently more difficult to photograph. Dark skin is
in the lowest range of values in most images, but the specular highlights of
that skin can reach the highest range of values. Underexpose and you lose all
shading; overexpose and you lose the geometric definition given by specular
highlights.

Pale skin can be made easier to photograph in challenging lighting conditions
by using a matte powder, which diffuses specular highlights and reduces the
value range. This doesn't work well on dark skin, because subtle shadows are
less visible and you lose the impression of shape; you need the specular
highlights, but they greatly increase the value range.

The problem with early colour films wasn't really hue (all human skin falls
into a remarkably narrow range of hues), but a lack of sensitivity and dynamic
range compared to monochrome films. They coped with over-exposure reasonably
well, but even slight under-exposure would obliterate the detail on dark skin.
This limitation of chemistry was a constant problem in all forms of colour
photography, but the social burden fell disproportionately on dark-skinned
portraiture subjects. Later emulsions had far better rendition of lowlights
and smooth compression of highlights, which vastly improved their performance
with dark skin.

~~~
aeturnum
I just want to note that the technical causes you list here are, arguably,
totally beside the point.

All technical systems have strengths and weaknesses. When systems are
conceived and developed their goals are set through a culturally-created
understanding of what the system "should" do. The lack of attention to darker
faces (from chemical process selection to selection of people depicted in
kodak's system calibration cards) explains how we got this particular set of
technical limitations instead of one that, say, tended to over-expose easily.

> Dark-skinned faces are inherently more difficult to photograph

I would say that dark-skinned faces are inherently poorly captured by the
photographic technology we have developed, which has focused on detail rather
than dynamic range.

~~~
jdietrich
_> selection of people depicted in kodak's system calibration cards_

The choice of the model does reflect some amount of bias, but it doesn't cause
bias in the printing process.

Precise calibration was done with a test chart and a densitometer. Shirley was
just a quick reference used throughout the day, to check at a glance whether
prints were unnaturally blue or purple or washed out due to changes in the
developer chemistry. Fuji usually supplied test films and prints with Asian
models, even in European markets; the motion picture industry originally used
porcelain dolls. A multi-ethnic test image wouldn't have provided better
accuracy.

 _> I would say that dark-skinned faces are inherently poorly captured by the
photographic technology we have developed, which has focused on detail rather
than dynamic range._

Except that the opposite was true for the entire duration of the film era. The
photographic film industry was acutely aware of the fact that most consumer
photographs were taken on compact cameras with mediocre lenses and usually
printed at 6"x4". They were also aware that the main complaints from consumers
and darkroom technicians were about exposure latitude and colour accuracy.
Their development efforts and marketing materials reflected this awareness.

Most consumers had never even heard the word "resolution" until the megapixel
wars. Ektar, the only Kodak colour negative film specifically marketed as
being especially fine-grained and high-resolution, failed commercially and was
discontinued after five years.

~~~
aeturnum
This is not the only argument that color films were developed in a way that
excluded people of color[1]. I'm not an expert.

You're correct that the film ecosystem of photography was not developed with
resolution in mind. I was thinking of the way in which digital sensors capture
the most bit depth in the upper tones [2]. This would likely not have been
pursued if test targets had subjects with darker skin colors than their
surroundings.

[1] [https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-
bias](https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias) [2]
[https://digital-photography-school.com/exposing-to-the-
right...](https://digital-photography-school.com/exposing-to-the-right/)

------
js2
Fascinating. For about a decade my father owned a one-hour photo lab back in
the eighties. I worked for him.

When he purchased the equipment for his lab, he didn’t have a ton of money so
the equipment was only semi automated. There were two machines, one to develop
the color negative film and another to make prints.

I operated the printing machine. This involved sitting at a console and
feeding each strip of negatives (typically 36 frames) one image at a time over
a lamp which lit the negative from below. I then punched some buttons to make
each print. I was assisted by a computer. But the computer was dumb. It looked
at the negative and tried to average out the exposure so that the resulting
print on average would be grey. 18% grey to be exact.

So my job was to look at this inverse negative that was 1” x 1.5”, figure out
what the scene actually was, then override the computer’s exposure and color
balance to get a correct print. 12 minutes later when the print had developed
I’d know if I guessed correctly.

On a good day, I’d print about 100 rolls of film, 3600 prints, and maybe I’d
have to redo about 36 of those.

Now this was in Miami and so I was printing picture of every subject and skin
type under the sun.

And the funny thing is, I don’t recall ever noticing, particularly, that there
were any issues with prints of persons of color.

What I do remember distinctly is that my dad and I never agreed on blue/yellow
color balance. I thought he made everyone look like Smurfs. I pleaded with him
to look at the whites of people’s eyes. Never won that battle. It was his
shop.

Also, beach scenes. Snow scenes. Cameras and film often (counterintuitively)
underexposed those.

But this was long ago and maybe I didn’t notice or don’t remember.

~~~
Steve44
> Also, beach scenes. Snow scenes. Cameras and film often (counterintuitively)
> underexposed those.

The snow being under-exposed is the camera is trying to balance out the image
to 18% grey [usually]. This means in a scene with mainly bright white snow it
will expose to make the scene grey, unless you override it. The camera can't
[with current technology as far as I know] know that you are shooting snow. If
you're shooting in snow then you probably want to adjust exposure by +2 as a
starting point.

Photographers used to carry around a physical grey card and would use that to
take a light meter reading from. That would give the base standard exposure
for the ambient light so the scene should be correctly exposed. [ it's more
complex due to dynamic range etc but that covers the basics ]

------
dang
All: this post was flagged. But it is obviously intellectually interesting and
therefore on topic here, regardless of one's views on race and other issues.
It's full of fascinating detail, and even has a technical aspect for the less-
curious among us who only find technical things interesting. I've turned off
the flags and rolled back the timestamp on the post.

We can debait the title a bit, but a substantive article with a slightly baity
title is not one that should be flagged. If the title is your issue, you're
welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com, or suggest a better title in the
thread, which we'll happily use if we see the suggestion.

One last thing: if you're going to comment on a thread like this, can you
please top up on the site guidelines first? Especially this one: _Comments
should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more
divisive._ Remember that we're going for good conversation—respectful and two-
sided—rather than ideological or political battle.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
nkurz
Thanks for resurrecting this post! I also appreciate the clear guidance that
"a substantive article with a slightly baity title is not one that should be
flagged". Maybe this could be added to the
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)?

I'm not sure, though, that it makes sense to focus on the idea that it was a
"mistake" to flag this article. I think flagging is currently one of the
weakest areas of the HN moderation system, in that it allows a minority to
suppress discussion of otherwise good articles that they disagree with.
Clearer guidelines can help, but I think you should also think hard about how
the system can be changed to be more resilient to "mistakes".

Maybe flagging of articles with some minimum number of upvotes should act only
as a "request for moderator review" rather than having any immediate visible
effect?

Maybe there could be a way (either mandatory or optional) to explain why an
article was flagged? I presume it would be easier to review a flag that says
"Bad title, should be X" than just an opaque and universal flag.

Maybe there could be some better feedback for users who flag articles, to tell
them if they are flagging articles "correctly"? As it is, I presume a lot of
people persist in doing what they think is best, even if you think they are
using the system incorrectly.

It's great that thanks to good moderation HN is still going strong after all
these years. Obviously you are doing many things right! But I strongly feel
that current flagging system needs to be rethought for this success to
continue. Explanatory comments like the one you made here are helpful, but I
think some deeper changes will also be necessary.

~~~
dang
Ok I took out "That was a mistake." Fair point. Also, I looked at the history
of the users who flagged it, and none of them had a history of flagging
obviously good articles.

I don't know if the flagging system needs rethinking though. The way it works
has been stable for years. I appreciate that such claims are a bit irritating,
because they're based on a view of the site that not everybody gets to see.
But the [flagged] marker is publicly visible, and if you or anyone sees an
article in [flagged] state that ought not to be flagged—say, one whose
signal/noise ratio is as high as the OP or better—then please tell us
(hn@ycombinator.com is best, because that way we're sure to see it). You
especially, because we know how much and how sincerely and for how long you
have cared about open discussion on this site.

------
marmada
It is unclear to me why there is "inherited bias" in film/photography
technology. Inherited bias implies that the biased film practices of the past
have spilled over into the present, causing further racial bias in
photography.

While it's true that photography in the past was racially biased, it is
unclear why modern photography is still racially biased. It may just be
genuinely harder to photograph dark skin, after all, the article even says
that attempts have been made to fix racial bias in photography.

All of this being said, even if photography is not racially biased and the
issue is more technological rather than social, the problem should still be
fixed.

I could also be wrong about all of this, and in reality dark skin is just as
easy to photograph as light skin, but the article did not give a modern
example of the racially biased "Shirley card"\--except for facial recognition
technology, but I didn't really consider that photography in the traditional
sense.

Edit:

While modern photography may not be racially biased, Kwindla does make an
excellent point that machine learning is replicating the past mistakes of
photography.

~~~
speedplane
> While it's true that photography in the past was racially biased, it is
> unclear why modern photography is still racially biased. It may just be
> genuinely harder to photograph dark skin

Perhaps if those with dark skin were a majority, far more R&D spending would
go into dealing with dark skin tones than say, better zoom lenses or image
processing speed. As a practical example, I suspect HDR would have arrived
much faster than it did.

~~~
creato
Camera companies have been competing on ISO/gain performance and dynamic range
for as long as they've existed. It has little or nothing to do with skin
color. There are _plenty_ of motivations for delivering high ISO and good
dynamic range beyond capturing skin colors.

The idea that it was furniture companies and chocolate vendors that drove this
development is absurd, that is probably just Kodak sales pitches backfiring on
them 50 years later. Anyone that wanted to take a photo of a white person, let
alone any subject, in a slightly darker environment wanted the same thing.

Or for an even better way to look at it: if you can photograph fast moving
subjects twice as well, you can also photograph subjects twice as dark. Again,
this is something _everyone_ that uses a camera wants, independent of race.

As for HDR: it is only relatively recently that digital sensors have started
outperforming film's dynamic range, which was pretty good for a very long
time. Digital camera vendors absolutely had massive financial incentive to fix
this deficit. When they started to even come close, that's when the market
exploded for movie production, and probably a lot of other commercial
applications as well.

------
neilv
The 1995 Multicultural Shirley Card image in the article is beyond my skill,
but I was a little confused by it, in a way that might be relevant to the
article.

I'd expect it to let you calibrate for the black woman's hair detail without
blowing out the white dress, but this image on my screen (print? scan?)
doesn't seem to have done that.

It looks like the black woman's hair is almost lost in this image, yet it
looks like the photographer put a hair light on the blonde woman, and not on
the black woman.

(Lighting: In the reflections in their eyes, it looks like two studio lights.
A narrow hair light for the blonde, from camera left, might be a third. Also
looks like a backdrop light behind, which might also be doing that small hint
of rear lighting on camera right of the black woman's hair, which emphasizes
that the rest of the hair isn't lit as well as it could be.)

(Outfit exposure: The gray outfit might be Gray Card gray, and you can also
compare it to the white outfit. The black dress looks hopeless for exposure,
at least in this print/scan.)

(Focus: The blonde head looks in a bit softer focus, which might be accidental
or glamorous.)

~~~
tropdrop
Thank you for sharing - not being familiar with calibration cards, I only paid
attention to the features of faces (which seem well-rendered on the print),
though the white dresses seemed to unnaturally lack shadow. I did not notice
how the black hair texture on the women to the left and right was completely
lost until you pointed it out.

~~~
neilv
With studio lighting (often powerful strobes, though this time it might just
be continuous hot lights), it's pretty easy for something white to get blown
out completely. If you also have something dark in the scene, you might need
more light on that, at the same time that you're trying not to get too much
light off the white. One tool in the studio is to use multiple light sources
and modifiers. I don't know why that didn't seem to happen for the black
woman's hair in this particular print. (The exposure of the white dress might
be exactly as they intended, however -- almost an extreme, but the folds still
detectable.)

------
Chris2048
Can someone explain the following,

The author says: instead of seeking a solution, the technician had decided
that my body was somehow unsuitable for the stage"

But the technician said: "We have a problem. Your jacket is lighter than your
face, That’s going to be a problem for lighting"

In what sense did the technician decide the author should be removed from the
stage, and seek no other solution?

~~~
patrickg_zill
You can do an image search on your favorite search engine and look for someone
like Donna Brazile, who has been in politics for a long time and understands
appearing on TV.

Then you can look at the clothes she is wearing and realize that in every
photo where she is wearing a lighter dress or jacket, the automatic exposure
settings of the camera adjusted for the average lighting of the scene and
underexposed her face.

That is why, because Brazile has done countless TV appearances for decades ...
in most of the photos you can see that she wears darker jackets or clothing.

------
philwelch
For an illustration of how bad photography used to be, consider this
photograph of the 1990-1991 Chicago Bulls:
[https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/20/craig-
hodges-m...](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/apr/20/craig-hodges-
michael-jordan-nba-chicago-bulls#img-2)

You can barely make out Michael Jordan's facial features. _Michael Jordan_ ,
in a _team photograph of the 1990 /91 Chicago Bulls_.

The lesson here is to design technology so it works for everyone, not just
people like you. Sometimes it's a matter of literal skin color, sometimes it's
a question of physical size and shape or abilities.

~~~
lm28469
That's a bad example, half the pic is white (white guys + white shirts), the
other half is black (black guys + black suits and dark background). Even with
today's tech it's easy to mess a picture like that. It also looks like it was
badly scanned / digitalised., cameras in the 90s were way more capable than
that.

There is no magic, photography is all about light, darker skin colors reflect
less light, thus you need to ramp up the exposure or the sensitivity of the
film, which destroys details/highlights. The only racial related thing here
would be the photographer chosing to correctly expose one skin color over
another.

That one is similar to your pic but even with the bad resolution you can tell
it's much better :
[https://usercontent1.hubstatic.com/13875852_f520.jpg](https://usercontent1.hubstatic.com/13875852_f520.jpg)

Idk what type of film was used for that particular pic but some films are made
to better render white people's skin tones (kodak portra for example), while
other are made for the asian markets, some are better for snowy/sandy
landscapes, other for blueish/greenish scenes, &c.

On the other hand, black and white film works very well on black people:
[https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article8111113.ece/ALT...](https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article8111113.ece/ALTERNATES/s810/Cassius-
Clay-later-Muhammad-Ali.jpg)

~~~
philwelch
I did specifically go looking for a more difficult photo; adjusting exposure
can help to capture a single skin tone, so a diverse group of skin tones is
going to be harder. MJ’s skin tone in particular is pretty dark, though I
remember it looking a shade or two lighter at times; I don’t know if that’s
because the photographers and TV cameraman adjusted exposure so we could more
clearly see him or just normal suntans (off-seasons back home in NC in the
summer vs. winter in Chicago). Scottie Pippen, for example, looks relatively
fine in the photo.

Although it’s a harder photograph to get right in terms of technical
difficulty, it’s also more than a fair chance to the photographer since
everyone is more or less sat down in a controlled environment. Maybe the Bulls
didn’t have the best equipment or photographers in the world, but it’s not a
total amateur operation, either.

------
dusted
This is interesting, I've always thought that makers of image capture
equipment were striving to create technology to capture the world, as it is,
without any bias towards any particular subject. Maybe, in a way they were,
and they simply went for the lowest hanging fruit first? or maybe they simply
put most effort where they believed that there would be most gain for least
effort. The reason why they started at one point is not really important, the
important thing is that they continue to strive to improve. Not because some
group of people are excluded, but because, from a technical standpoint,
they're not done before they can capture and display an accurate, neutral,
non-biased, factual representation of reality. Same goes for audio, I'm sure
getting voice right had priority over music, and that some styles of music had
priority over others, but, we're not done before all SOUND, not just music,
can be captured and represented accurately.

~~~
lm28469
> I've always thought that makers of image capture equipment were striving to
> create technology to capture the world, as it is, without any bias towards
> any particular subject.

You'd be surprised, especially with pre-digital photo. Each film emulsion has
its own characteristics. I won't go to much into details because it's
explained all over the internet already, but here is a quick comparison of a
few emulsions:

[https://www.thephoblographer.com/2017/11/27/quick-
comparison...](https://www.thephoblographer.com/2017/11/27/quick-comparison-
todays-favorite-iso-400-color-films/)

------
dandare
As fun of darker skin adult models, I always found it annoying how most adult
videos mishandle dark skin. I always thought there must be something inherent
in the technology that makes it not optimized for darker skins, especially in
the hands of less skilled cameramen.

I hope no one will be offended by my comment, I mean it factually.

------
SpaceInvader
Is there any way to read that not being logged in?

~~~
baud147258
Switching to another browser might help; it's what I do when I've reached my
free article limits.

------
haihaibye
The people who invented the tech (US/Europe/Japan) optimised it for consumers
around them.

If darker skinned people had invented it, or had been a richer consumer group
things would have been different - to think otherwise you'd have to think
greedy capitalists would give up piles of cash to be racist.

Why hate on inventors who create something cool just because it doesn't quite
work as well for all groups of people?

Surely this also left a gap in the market - someone could have optimized film
for darker skin tones and made a lot of money?

~~~
dang
The article covers all of this closely, and I see nothing in it that can
fairly be described as "hate on inventors". Would you mind reviewing the site
guidelines at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)?
I think you'll notice that they require HN comments to be more substantive
than this one here.

For one, there's this: " _Please respond to the strongest plausible
interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
criticize. Assume good faith._" The author of an article is someone.

Then there's this: " _Eschew flamebait._ " Taking an HN thread further into
flamewar, which is the direction your comment points in and alas even moves a
little into, definitely breaks that guideline. Keep in mind that once one
person goes there, a lot of others are going to go there—for and against,
bashing each other along the way—so the biggest responsibility is not to be
first to go there. If we all avoid that, no flamewar.

There's also: " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._" It seems to me
that the dismissals here were indeed shallow, reminiscent of instant
objections that pop into one's mind when encountering what, for whatever
reason, we dislike. That mechanism is hardly unique to you—it is active in
100% of us. But the HN guidelines have been carefully written to ask all of us
to slow down and inhibit that mechanism—to be more reflective and less
reflexive—because this is the only way to get good conversation on the
internet.

There are two other guidelines that the comment breaks, but I'll leave them as
an exercise for the curious.

~~~
haihaibye
The article does not cover at all why black people didn't invent their own
film technology or were a sufficiently organised or attractive consumer group
to spur someone else to (it was chocolate and furniture makers)

"Hating" is perhaps too strong a word, but the author makes multiple
accusations of racism against companies, technicians etc - from my reading
thinking things are far too intentional and getting angry/offended - where in
reality it's a mix of money and physics - not racism against a people.

~~~
dang
"Hating" is much too strong a word to describe the article—so much so that
invoking it in a thread like this is a big upping of the flamewar ante.
There's no need to do that, but it's hard to resist, when a topic stirs up
powerful emotions. This creates a need for relief, and venting that energy in
the form of extreme words is one way to get relief. Unfortunately, it doesn't
relieve anything at a community level. It just tosses the hot potato around in
a way that only makes the potato hotter and more painful to the one who
catches it next. What provides relief at a community level is when people find
ability in themselves to acknowledge truth in what the other is saying.

I would say there is more love in the article—consider the passages about the
author's grandfather, whose humiliation she in a way dedicated her career to
repairing—and later about her father. Note how she includes a moving (to me at
least) moment of reconciliation at the end (" _Her eyes were glassy as she
said goodbye. Mine were, too, grateful for her vulnerability._ "). How easy it
would have been to shame the woman who made the faux pas instead. Such moments
of acknowledgment are hard to come by, and are worth emulating. This is not
someone who's just out to hate.

> _thinking things are far too intentional and getting angry /offended_

A more charitable interpretation of the article is that a series of omissions
can compound into a bias, even without deliberate attempts to exclude. That's
interesting, and I'm a bit puzzled by the aversion in some commenters to look
at it. Yes, angry accusations have been made and still get made, but that
leads us to hear them also when they're not really there. We need the ability
to notice when they're not really there, so as to respond in kind. That would
be a de-escalating movement.

> _the author makes multiple accusations of racism against companies,
> technicians etc_

I'd urge you to read the article again and see whether those are really there,
or if you haven't somehow filled those details in, perhaps because it felt
that way while reading it. I just reread the whole thing myself, to see
whether I had missed some accusation of racism against a company or a
technician. I didn't find any. In fact, the second reading convinced me that
the author must have taken great pains to restrain herself from doing
that—since nothing would be easier for someone in her position to do.

The article does contain a lot of pain—the pain of being unseen, excluded. And
she does do something difficult for the reader: she creates tension by never
expressing the pain directly. It's there implicitly, which heightens the
effect. That's a pretty effective device for making a point, and I wonder if
that's really what people are reacting to: the discomfort we feel when
something intense is present but not expressed. But there's also generosity in
this. If someone holds back from expressing as much as they could, even when
feelings are intense, it creates space for others to do the same. Those
opportunities are worth noticing and acting on, because otherwise we all just
repeat the cycle.

------
patrickg_zill
Take a raking kind of light, and shine it on a beige to brown colored wall, so
that the light will be stronger on one side and gradually fade in intensity
(that is, less reflected light) across the field of view.

Now place a different shade of brown upholstered chair, in front of this wall.

Take a photo using the Hasselblad X1D, currently considered to have the most
accurate color of mainstream cameras.

Now try to print it accurately, even with the best quality paper and a high
end inkjet printer.

Even master printmakers will struggle with it.

Why?

