Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
We’ve already seen some cases of AI being biased towards lighter skin tones. But Google wants to turn it around and it’s now using an alternative, more inclusive skin tone scale.
Teaming up with a Harvard professor, Google is using and open-sourcing the Monk Skin Tone (MST) Scale. It’s more inclusive than the current tech-industry standard, making various skin tones included in search results.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love it when two different forms of art intertwine to create something new and unique. Such is the project Too Close for Comfort by the UK-based photographer Courtenay Florence. Florence mixes macro photography and writing, adds a generous amount of intimacy, psychology, and subconscious, and sprinkles it with a bit of horror. Her photos show skin up close and personal, and each of them tells a story that will send shivers down your spine.
On its August issue covers, Vogue features the amazing gymnast Simone Biles, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. While people are thrilled to see her on the cover, the photos themselves have caused quite an outrage. People have called out Leibovitz over “poor lighting” and “washed out” skin tones, adding that Vogue should have hired a black photographer who better understands dark skin tones.
If you are doing any kind of beauty work, you know that skin is one of the hardest things to deal with. You want to make the skin look good, while not ending up with a porcelain face that looks too smooth and textureless to be real.
There are many tricks of the trade for beauty retouchers and Stefan is sharing three of his favorites: 1. How to remove Peach Fuzz (turns out that this is how you call those little facial hairs). 2. How to remove goosebumps. Yea, I know, the easy answer is heat the room up. If you don’t have control over the room temperature, and your model looks like a duck (or a goose), not all is lost. And 3. How to eliminate bruises.
In recent years, the trends in retouching photos have been changing. Altering someone’s appearance isn’t so welcome anymore, judging from the recently reformed guidelines at CVS Pharmacy and Getty Images. Young photographer Peter DeVito has shared a photo series that goes along with these trends, but he’s taking it a step further. In his portraits, he has left the acne unretouched. His goal is to send the message that “acne is normal.”
Many people don’t feel comfortable in their own skin. Imposed beauty standards and too much Photoshop in ads don’t help at all. Norwegian pharmacist Vitus have created an ad that might help people feel good in their own skin and meet all the changes that will come with aging.
The ad shows how out skin changes over a lifespan of 100 years – and it all fits in only 60 seconds. There’s no heavy retouching, just pure, natural beauty of skin of all ages and colors.
“Beauty is everywhere.” This is how Russian-born artist Ruslan Khasanov describes the motto that drives his creative work. In his latest video, he found beauty in bodily landscapes. He turns human skin into landscapes using nothing but some paint and a macro lens. It feels like you’re watching satellite shots of another world, so similar, yet so different from ours.
How to properly light the model depends on several aspects, and one of them is skin color. Insecure’s director of photography, Ava Berkofsky, makes the actors in the series look fabulous. In this 2-minute video, she shares her lessons on properly lighting the dark-skinned actors to achieve the best results.
The ability to see under the human skin is something that we are more used to finding in superhero cartoons, sci-fi movies, or really expensive medical equipment. With the HyperCam, that might be about to change – and in a potentially affordable way.
Our eyes have always been able to operate much better than our consumer camera equipment, allowing us to see things our cameras can’t. But as technology progresses, it was only a matter of time until that changed. Jointly developed by members of the University of Washington and Microsoft Research, the HyperCam uses both visible and invisible near-infrared light to see under the surface and reveal unseen details.
It does its magic by illuminating a scene with 17 different wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum and taking a photo for each of them. In a second stage, the HyperCam’s software is then able to separate the images that are most likely to contain detail that can’t be seen with the naked eye, or through conventional photography.
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