When he purchased the equipment for his lab, he didn’t have a ton of money so the equipment was only semi automated. There were two machines, one to develop the color negative film and another to make prints.
I operated the printing machine. This involved sitting at a console and feeding each strip of negatives (typically 36 frames) one image at a time over a lamp which lit the negative from below. I then punched some buttons to make each print. I was assisted by a computer. But the computer was dumb. It looked at the negative and tried to average out the exposure so that the resulting print on average would be grey. 18% grey to be exact.
So my job was to look at this inverse negative that was 1” x 1.5”, figure out what the scene actually was, then override the computer’s exposure and color balance to get a correct print. 12 minutes later when the print had developed I’d know if I guessed correctly.
On a good day, I’d print about 100 rolls of film, 3600 prints, and maybe I’d have to redo about 36 of those.
Now this was in Miami and so I was printing picture of every subject and skin type under the sun.
And the funny thing is, I don’t recall ever noticing, particularly, that there were any issues with prints of persons of color.
What I do remember distinctly is that my dad and I never agreed on blue/yellow color balance. I thought he made everyone look like Smurfs. I pleaded with him to look at the whites of people’s eyes. Never won that battle. It was his shop.
Also, beach scenes. Snow scenes. Cameras and film often (counterintuitively) underexposed those.
But this was long ago and maybe I didn’t notice or don’t remember.