Color film was built for white people. Here's what it did to dark skin.

I can’t believe it took chocolate and wood for people to address this issue

Ironically, when B&W film first came out, it couldn't photograph blue eyes very well. Blue eyes registered as white, and people looked like ghosts. Some actors with blue eyes would be told they weren't the right type for film.

"Chocolate and Wood" - sounds like a 70s funk/ soul group.

America: white and black people mixed in a photo, problem. Me as an Asian: we didnt even think about that here.

Absolutely, true... I went to photography school in the late 70's and Black people were hard to photograph, UNLESS you had a CORRECT exposure. Once I let it slip that I was perfecting my light metering, because I had to get the darker skin tones exposed correctly and my subject called me a RACIST!!! Obviously she had NO idea how film and light worked!

Holy fuck you make it sound like engineers intentionally make it so black people cant use their stuff.

This is a myth. It's totally a myth. Color film science has never used Caucasian skin as the basis for emulsion formulation. Portraits weren't even the original market in the development of color film. Color film was developed initially for the nature and science markets, and they used (and still use) calibrated color patches to determine the accuracy of the color tones. Botanists and ornithologists were far more critical of color accuracy across the spectrum than portrait photographers. Kodak created the so-called "Shirley" negative in the 1950s--20 years after their famous Kodachrome film was invented--because the US Congress broke up their retail consumer color printing monopoly. They were forced to give independent film processors all the information to process and print Kodak Kodacolor film, which included a test negative to calibrate their prints. The important portion of the negative was NOT the white woman in the picture (she was just there for "interest"). The important portions are the color and gray patches that can be read by a densitometer to make sure the numbers of the print matched specifications. I used a Shirley negative myself in the 1970s to do my own color printing (and I'm a black, btw). Color film development never had anything to do Caucasion skin in particular. Companies were always trying to reproduce the entire spectrum satisfactorily.

Its almost as if bright things are easier to put on picture😅😂

Kids eat the white part of an Oreo RACISM

It was actually a technical issue not a racial one.

In middle school the professional photographers they hired every year for the annual class pictures could never get a decent enough lighting for the black kids' faces to be distinguishable. And that was less than ten years ago so it's kind of frustrating

I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw the ‘Is Microsoft’s Kinect Racist?’ at 4:01

Seems like people didn't really watch the video. Also, physics and chemistry are not racist, but design can definitely be.

Kinda reminds me how the “peach” coloured crayon used to be called “skin” as if it were the only colour skin could possibly be

This video is deceptive on a number of scores. ‘Dynamic range’ describes the ability of a film to record detail in both light and dark areas of an image. Both film and digital sensors have poorer dynamic range than the human retina– these are simply physical limitations of the medium. This is why dark people are difficult to photograph. The video states that film companies didn’t care about dynamic range because they were racist, but in fact improved dynamic range has been a holy grail they have long sought after. The racism accusation is based on an entirely false premise. The video makers also suggest that the filmmakers did not care about reproducing browns accurately. The reality is that the red, green, and blue layers of the emulsion are layered, with the top layer being the most brilliant. This physical limitation demands that a film be balanced towards red, green, or blue. Kodachrome and Agfachrome favored red (and therefore browns). Ektachrome favored blue. While color film improved over time, it looks like the video makers confuse technical limitations with racism here as well. The video makers present no evidence that film chemists ever considered race in their product development. Instead, they must be racists because they invented a medium with inherent technical limitations. (Even today, a good practice is to overexpose dark subjects somewhere between a third to a full stop.) Wouldn’t it be more reasonable simply to conclude that film improved over time? The video makers are also inaccurate as to the date color film was introduced: ‘If you developed color film between the 1940s and the 1990s...’ Agfachrome was introduced in 1932, Kodachrome in 1935. If they get something this simple wrong, what are we to conclude about the rest of the video?

Maybe the real camera film was the friends we met along the way

This video doesn't seem so controversial, whats the problem?

“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” – Albert Einstein

One of the many prime examples of Vox's buffoonery.

Even using digital, I find dark skins very hard to properly expose. Not enough light, and there is no detail, too much light and it looks weird.