> Kodak designed and standardized its color film to represent Caucasian skin tones.
That may be an urban legend. There was a popular reference card that had a light-skinned woman, but that wasn't the problem. This is closer to the old Technicolor vs. Eastmancolor debate.
Here's the trailer for Disney's "Song of the South" (1946) [1] That's three-strip Technicolor. Good dynamic range, with each of three colors on its own strip of black and while film. Here's the trailer from "Shaft" (1971) [2]. That's single-strip Eastmancolor. Dynamic range is not as good, as you can see in the street scenes where lighting wasn't controlled. Eastmancolor took over in the 1950s because the cameras are much smaller and production is easier and cheaper.
NTSC Color TV really did have something to standardize skin tones. NTSC color TV transmits an intensity value and two vector components which determine the color. The color vector components are rather low bandwidth (only about 10 full range color changes across the width of the tube), and so some NTSC receivers had a gimmick which, when the vector is near the "skin tone line" for a standard skin tone, pulled it to a fixed value.[3] The effect was that all faces had roughly the same skin tone in UV color space, but intensity could vary.
That may be an urban legend. There was a popular reference card that had a light-skinned woman, but that wasn't the problem. This is closer to the old Technicolor vs. Eastmancolor debate.
Here's the trailer for Disney's "Song of the South" (1946) [1] That's three-strip Technicolor. Good dynamic range, with each of three colors on its own strip of black and while film. Here's the trailer from "Shaft" (1971) [2]. That's single-strip Eastmancolor. Dynamic range is not as good, as you can see in the street scenes where lighting wasn't controlled. Eastmancolor took over in the 1950s because the cameras are much smaller and production is easier and cheaper.
NTSC Color TV really did have something to standardize skin tones. NTSC color TV transmits an intensity value and two vector components which determine the color. The color vector components are rather low bandwidth (only about 10 full range color changes across the width of the tube), and so some NTSC receivers had a gimmick which, when the vector is near the "skin tone line" for a standard skin tone, pulled it to a fixed value.[3] The effect was that all faces had roughly the same skin tone in UV color space, but intensity could vary.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxwqH47Ne70
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFlsufZj9Fg
[3] https://bramstout.nl/en/webbooks/vectorscopes/#yiq-and-the-s...