The output from any camera type or brand, Depends entirely on the person holding the camera, That's the way it has always been, Hopefully its the way things will stay if there is to be any creativity left in photography. Hi Jane, I saw this post yesterday, and decided to come back to it after there had been some other responses, as I too had not heard about the 'Nikon' skin tones. There's a lot of adjustment that can be made and store as a setting for shooting specific genres, but as mentioned above, this can be re-tweaked in raw conversion. That's before you even start photoshop up:) The 'Portrait' mode is my preference, but I tend to leave white balance in auto setting, as it has yeilded some good results in the past, by giving a cooler look to the skintones, that I might not have considered looking at if I had set the white balance specifically.