ABSTRACT

Adobe Lightroom offers a presets tool that applies fixed or AI-powered edits to ease the process of photo editing. While some Lightroom presets purport to ideally edit for different skin tones, photographic technology has historically centered the accurate representation of white skin, as seen in the history of color balance and in contemporary metering technologies. Because of this inherent bias, Lightroom's automaticediting presets foster what Joyce E. King has described as dysconscious racism. Wedding photography, exemplified in wedding magazines, presupposes a white- or lighter-skinned subject when creating presets for the popular "light and airy" editing style. Presets replace the surfeit of tutorials describing how to achieve balance when photographing Black skin. By using presets, photographers are made passive in the production of race through media. The stakes of this misrepresentation are not inconsequential: they devalue Black people and cement racist structures.

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