What makes this work innovative is that it grew from the commitment to partnering with people who truly understand the problem we were trying to solve, in every step of the process. We knew that building for the community meant we had to acknowledge our own gaps and learn from the folks who know this issue best.

Camera and image technology doesn’t work well for darker skin tones because, for many years, it wasn’t tested on darker skin tones. But through radical collaboration between image experts and Google, we were able to create the rigorous testing process necessary to create.

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.

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. The result is Real Tone, a collection of technical improvements to the Pixel 6 camera and Google Photos that more accurately and beautifully highlight the nuances of all skin tones.

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.

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

We started this process by working with image experts, like photographers, cinematographers, and colorists, who are celebrated for their beautiful and accurate imagery of communities of color. They tested our cameras 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.

All of that wisdom helped us make a more equitable camera. First, to make a great portrait, your phone has to SEE a face in the picture. Our experts helped us improve our face detection models, so the camera sees you as you are… From there, we improved our auto-white balance tuning to better reflect the beauty of your skin tone and we improved our auto-exposure tuning to make sure your skin looks like you- not unnaturally darker or brighter. They also inspired our teams to make advances like algorithmically reducing stray light that can make darker skin tones look ashy or washed out. And making Night Sight Portraits less blurry for people who have darker skin.

The launch of Real Tone and its global campaign initially resulted in an 8% lift in consideration and a 7% lift in purchase intent, and continues to grow through Q1.

Our mission to create a more equitable camera has transcended Google, and now we’re seeing more companies in the image-making space working toward more accurate representation of darker skin tones, like Adobe’s partnership with Dario Calmese to bring more skin tones to Lightroom Presets and Snapchat’s commitment to building a more inclusive camera.

Real Tone also improves the camera performance for photos and videos in third-party apps like Snapchat. And we hope this work continues to inspire everyone in the industry to innovate for and with people of all skin tones. Because feeling seen shouldn't be limited to just one tool or company.