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Shirley Card Research Paper

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Shirley Cards are color reference cards, specifically used to balance skin color, in print photography. These cards are named after Shirley Page, the Kodak model which is depicted in the color comparison prints distributed all over the world. Shirley Cards were used as the
“standard” that all other printed photographs would be compared to for decades.
In the photographs Shirley had blue eyes, pale skin, dark brown hair, and wore vibrant colored ensembles. Later, when Shirley left Kodak other Caucasian models were brought in to replace her, but the name Shirley Cards stuck. Any time a print was made Shirley Cards had to be taken into account. If the colors did not match up with Shirley Cards, photo lab technicians considered something to be wrong with their prints, therefore, …show more content…

The norms Shirley Cards depicted, however, turned out to be flawed. The color pallet used for Shirley Cards did not provide a broad enough range to properly depict skin tones of non-Caucasian races. At this time, film color both for print and motion pictures was all designed with high levels of reflectivity, since “Shirley’s” pale skin tone was recognized as the ideal

standard. This created an unfair biased toward white skin when it came to motion picture and photography. People took notice and began to complain of over or under exposure in prints and scenes of non-Caucasians.
In the early 1990’s, Kodak and other print companies recognized their shortcomings and began to redesign their Shirley Cards. They created multiracial color reference cards of African,
Asian, Latina, and Caucasian “Shirley’s” to appropriately capture different skin tones. One of these cards depicted an African women, a Caucasian women, and an Asian women posing together to exemplify the difference in skin color of each. Today, labs can take this a step further, by creating custom color pallets to fit a customer’s

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