Back in the age of incandescent lights we only had one color temperature to choose for studio production. Until fairly recently, studio lighting was almost exclusively incandescent. There were a few exceptions—if you didn’t mind lousy color quality, blistering UV, open flame, smoke, or neurotoxic waste, but incandescent was simply the choice. If you could overlook its lousy efficiency and enough waste heat to grill a steak, heating a piece of tungsten until it glows white-hot is a pretty good way to make broad-spectrum light.
And yet there was something sublime about a light source that is the physical embodiment of a theoretical blackbody radiator, upon which Lord Kelvin based the Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) scale. Whatever the shade, skin tones look great under the warm glow of incandescent. That positive quality is still worth pursuing today.
