I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for? But I have been thinking about the tendency to bleach black women on magazine covers and the history of considering technologies finished when they work adequately for white people and how these things affect vidding. Particularly for (literally) dark shows like a lot of horror or noir, the dark-skinned characters end up poorly lit and you have to manipulate the footage to bring out their expressions. (I say "dark-skinned" instead of "people of color" because this is usually not a problem with light-skinned poc.)
Another issue I had related to tech: One of my standard post-processing techniques is when prepping a vid for Web distribution is to blend the color footage with a grayscale copy of the footage, because this brightens the video, deepens the color, and makes a lot of the compressed Web-suitable video more visible on monitors (which tend to display darker than TV screens). That is, this is standard for my vids about white people. When I did this for a vid about a light-skinned woman of color, it made her skin look paler. I had to rework the scripts that had been fine for three previous vids with different lighting conditions, but all about white women.
These are the default images, one interior and one exterior, without any alterations by me (you can tell the original editor did some brightening and blurring to add a dreamlike effect for the forest scene):
These are the images with the kind of processing I usually do (+25% add, for people who work with layers and blending):
In the exterior scene, you can see that the foliage behind her is brighter and more distinct, but that the pale tones where her skin is highlit bleach out to white and she looks a few shades lighter-skinned than she does in the original picture. The bleaching effect isn't as noticeable in the interior image.
These are what I ended up with (+25% add, +50% overlay):
You can see the very palest highlights--for both Bonnie and the background--are still whited-out, but some of the midtones are restored and the darkest tones are darker than the original, which results in a brighter, more variable color, and doesn't make Bonnie look that much paler than the original image, although paler in the exterior shot than I remembered from the moving images. :( So possibly this is a failure and a negative example. I think the interior still has better color and still reasonably approximates her original skin tone, though.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2010-04-17 05:49 pm (UTC)Another issue I had related to tech: One of my standard post-processing techniques is when prepping a vid for Web distribution is to blend the color footage with a grayscale copy of the footage, because this brightens the video, deepens the color, and makes a lot of the compressed Web-suitable video more visible on monitors (which tend to display darker than TV screens). That is, this is standard for my vids about white people. When I did this for a vid about a light-skinned woman of color, it made her skin look paler. I had to rework the scripts that had been fine for three previous vids with different lighting conditions, but all about white women.
These are the default images, one interior and one exterior, without any alterations by me (you can tell the original editor did some brightening and blurring to add a dreamlike effect for the forest scene):
These are the images with the kind of processing I usually do (+25% add, for people who work with layers and blending):
In the exterior scene, you can see that the foliage behind her is brighter and more distinct, but that the pale tones where her skin is highlit bleach out to white and she looks a few shades lighter-skinned than she does in the original picture. The bleaching effect isn't as noticeable in the interior image.
These are what I ended up with (+25% add, +50% overlay):
You can see the very palest highlights--for both Bonnie and the background--are still whited-out, but some of the midtones are restored and the darkest tones are darker than the original, which results in a brighter, more variable color, and doesn't make Bonnie look that much paler than the original image, although paler in the exterior shot than I remembered from the moving images. :( So possibly this is a failure and a negative example. I think the interior still has better color and still reasonably approximates her original skin tone, though.