Guest Writer Tobias Björkgren
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I met Pratik during Stand out Photography Forum the last week of August in Stockholm. Bella Kotak did a live photoshoot with a model and Pratik was getting nerdy with the Capture One details ;). During the tech talk he showed us that they normally mute the colors on darker skin tones when they render too saturated before entering Photoshop and I got intrigued cause I go the opposite direction, with a minor adjustment that Pratik wanted me to tell you guys about!

My name is Tobias Björkgren and I am a professional photographer based in Stockholm. I’ve been a PhaseOne shooter for more than 5 years and this is a trick I want to share with you! 

If you are like me and want control over your pictures, this is a tip that will get you a flatter image from the start. I don’t really remember if it was Phase One support or my sales rep who taught me this, but I didn’t really like how some my images where more saturated than they were in real life. The shadows always had a prominent blue tone and skintones had a little oversaturation of the yellows. 

With the ICC profile under "Base Characteristics", you have a few options, like Flash, Portrait, Daylight etc. But if you scroll down to Effects, you can find the option no color correction. I am unsure if this is available for all cameras. At first your picture will look totally undersaturated and really flat, but that is okay. In the next step we will introduce contrast and color.

So to get it back to a level of the original color saturation and contrast I raise the contrast slider to about 8-15 depending the scene. And I raise the saturation slider to about 30-70. The difference now between the original Flash.icc profile and the no color correction is that I have muted yellows but still the red visible.

I hope you enjoyed this little tip, If you have any suggestions or input if this is good or bad please write a comment.

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Thank you to Tobias for sharing this awesome tip, I started using this and the end effect is that the colors tend to be more "level" across the range of saturation, especially on darker skin tones. This workflow comes in handy during these moments.