Fixing flesh tones on Epson Velvet Fine Art paper using Capture NX2

I really like the Epson Velvet Fine Art paper; however, I haven't been happy with how flesh tones are reproduced.  They seem a bit jaundiced and washed out.  Granted, part of that may be with my editing.  But, I use a profiled monitor, and they look fine on the screen.  Plus, I am able to get acceptable flesh tones with other papers.

At first I attributed it to the fact that the Epson Velvet Fine Art is not pure white, it's more of an off white in color.  But, the more I thought about it, I decided that using the "SPR2880 Velvet Fine Art Paper.ics" color profile for the paper should compensate.

So, I set out to see if there are other edit adjustments that I could make to make flesh tones more acceptable.  I wanted something easy and reproducible in other prints.  First I played around with the white balance - but I opted against that since the white balance is dependent on the light source use when the image was taken.

Since I use Nikon Capture NX2 as my primary image editing tool, I decided to tweak the Picture Control settings.  The neat thing about NX2 is that you can use Picture Control on any NEF file - not just those taken with camera's that have Picture Control built-in (which my Nikon D80 does not).  I found that increasing the saturation by 2 and decreasing the hue by 1 resulted in very acceptable flesh tones.  The difference these simple changes make are nothing short of remarkable.

I imagine that it would be possible to do something similar in PhotoShop.  I also have a problem with flesh tones on the Epson Watercolor paper - the next time I print on that paper I am going to try these same adjustments.

I am using the 13" x 19" sized paper and size the image at 12½" x 16½".  This size fits nicely in a 16" x 20" frame with a 2" mat border.