Taking photos of people with darker skin tones isn’t harder, but it is different. And if you don’t know that, those photos will often lose facial features and look flat.

There’s lot of history here, some of it debatable, but the general story is…

Early film developing used a sample photo of a white brunette as the standard for white balance.

Some time later, ad agencies complained to Kodak that photos of chocolates and dark woods weren’t quite right.

Kodak made some tweaks. And/or photographers learned to deal with it (both for product photos and people).

Digital cameras appear. Similar mistakes/oversights made by industry.

Now Google and others claim their cameras can do dark skin.