Photos shape the way we see each other and ourselves. And historically, camera technology hasn’t accurately represented darker skin tones. Camera and image technology have centered light skin–a bias that's crept into many of our products, even today. So we set out to design Google’s most inclusive camera, with a strong focus on people with darker skin tones.

The driving force behind this effort was to make the best in class camera and image product experiences for people of color.

Real Tone is a collection of technical improvements and mission to make our camera and image products work more equitably for people of color. We vastly improved our camera tuning models and algorithms to more accurately highlight the nuances of diverse skin tones with Real Tone software, including improved auto-exposure, auto-white balance, and other core features.

To do this, we partnered with a diverse group of image experts, like photographers, cinematographers, and colorists celebrated for their beautiful and accurate imagery of people of color, based on our strategy of building with the community for the community .

With Google’s product and engineering team, they tested the Pixel 6 camera and Google Photos editor in a wide range of tough lighting conditions. And in the process, they took thousands of portraits that made our image data sets 25x more diverse to look more like the world around us.

We partnered with a diverse group of image experts who worked directly with Google’s product and engineering team. They tested the Pixel 6 camera and Google Photos editor in a wide range of tough lighting conditions. And in the process, they took thousands of portraits that made our image data sets 25x more diverse to look more like the world around us.

Based on this research, we vastly improved our camera tuning models and algorithms to more accurately highlight the nuances of diverse skin tones with Real Tone software, including improved auto-exposure, auto-white balance, and other core features that more accurately and beautifully highlight the nuances of all skin tones.

Nov 2017 - First conversations about the idea.

Summer 2019 - Committed to product roadmap plan

May 2021 - Announced mission at I/O

Fall 2021 - Launched Real Tone at Fall Hardware event

The full campaign work ran at Google I/O, on Broadcast, Youtube, Google’s social channels, in a collaboration with New York Times Advertising and other publishers, as well as in branded TV content.

Since its launch in October 2021, the work has been enthusiastically received around the world, with 7 films from 5 different countries reaching over 70 million total views and impressions around the world, plus positive comments and reactions across the board from communities of color.

When we started, our goal was simply to create a better camera. But what we found is that this mission connected with people and audiences all over the world through stories that were as personal and nuanced as the people who viewed them. Launching with partners across the Americas, APAC, EMEA, and LATAM brought Real Tone to the screens of the people who will directly benefit from it.