Skin Tones

[Joy82]

I'm getting so frustrated with my portraits because of skin tones. Other photographers seem to have a beautiful glow to there children's skin. It's radiant and crisp looking. Is this post editing or in the camera?

[Bill Boehme]

It is very likely related to post-capture editing if you are shooting in RAW. Is the problem related to on-screen images or printed images or both?

You might consider using Digital Photo Professional (the software that came with your camera) if you are having problems getting satisfactory results with a third party program. It would be the simplest solution. DPP is fairly intuitive to learn and while it does not have all of the bells and whistles of some of the expensive programs, it should give very good results. DPP recognizes in-camera settings such as the shooting style (portrait, landscape, etc.) while none of the other third party applications are set up to do that automatically -- Adobe Photoshop/ACR and Adobe Lightroom can add shooting styles, but you must explicitly apply the desired style during the RAW conversion process.

If the on-screen version looks fine, but the printed image is dull in comparison, it could be a color management issue: either a profile mismatch problem or possibly a monitor that is not profiled and calibrated. It could also be a problem with the printer profile especially if using paper that does not have an ICC profile for your printer.