Well, that's not just lighting, but film processing. The way color film is developed, the balance that's chosen between the color negatives, has a huge effect on apparent colors -- as in the infamous story of the makeup tests for the green Orion woman in the first TOS pilot, where the lab tech kept thinking the green was a mistake and corrected it back to pink. Color correction is often used to create a desired look in a film, an obvious example being the green tinge to everything in The Matrix.
The TOS Enterprise miniature was silver-white, but color-timing errors in many FX shots often tinged it blue or green. As a result, Andrew Probert designed the TNG Enterprise to be azure-skinned as an homage to that, but the lighting and color-timing were arranged to make it look grey. Not quite the exact opposite, since the former was accidental and the latter intentional.
But FX aside, you're right that lighting has a lot to do with it. Colors often look very different under stage lighting than under normal lighting; for instance, TOS command uniforms in the first two seasons were actually green instead of gold, but the velour material looked gold under the bright stage lights (whereas the different material of Kirk's wraparound tunics, which was actually the same color, looked entirely different). And then there's Data's skin, which was actually pearlescent-white (the makeup actually contained ground mother-of-pearl), but which picked up the color of his uniform and looked gold on camera.
