Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah has a fascinating post about how photo upload sites and image editing packages look to someone whose skin is dark and who is shooting in very bright sunlight. This is just an example of a broader theme in the post: “The Subtle Business of Software Localization,” as Ethan puts it. Snippets:

The first thing I very quickly noticed: somehow all the photos that I uploaded to Yahoo Photos turned out darker than on Flickr (the services both resize uploaded photos). The photo-resizing algorithm used by Yahoo Photos was giving worse results. This was noticeable to me because a large number of photos featured darker-skinned people such as myself. The originals were fine and where there were lighter skin tones everything looked good, but with darker skintones, the resized photos were not so good.

…Thirdly, when retouching photos, the Quick Fix or Auto Correct options in Photoshop seemed tailored for lighter skintones so I was constantly having to do manual tweaking of my photos. Now this is not a big deal for a few photos and indeed it’s fun to fiddle with photos but after a couple of hundred images, it gets tiresome. I found mysef longing for “smarter” recognition by the software or for at least, a nice ‘dark skin’ option that I could set in a preferences dialog.

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