NEX skin tones driving me crazy

Personally, coming from Canon 7D, I find NEX 5N skin tones to be refreshingly realistic...but the whole Canon skin tone and over-cooked reds is a whole different topic.

I don't find jpeg comparisons between 2 cameras particularly illuminating since, even if you attempt to match jpeg parameters between the 2 bodies, 0, +1, -1, etc. can mean different things.

What jumped out at me right away though, was that there is a significant exposure difference in your 2 examples and I know from personal raw processing experience with a variety of cameras that exposure, brightness, etc. have a strong impact on color saturation. The stauration differences is what I would expect given the exposure differences.

A better comparison would be to have the model hold a white balancing card and shoot in manual exposure with spot metering off the same spot to try to match exposures. Then WB that in a raw converter and compare. I doubt you would see any differences as dramatic as what you're showing.

I'm quite happy with 5N skin tones but then, I always shoot just RAW. Here are few old samples of 5N skin tones that I was quite happy with:

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