Quote - I have hesitated to say anything about this, but I do have a problem with GC and skin maps in Poser 2012. I was trying to develope a V4 package for the market place but I guess I'm shelving it for now because of this problem. GC 'washes out' the color of the skin map. Hmm, maybe I'm not explaining this well. I look at my V4 maps in my art program and then I look at the resulting render and the skin tone is paler on render than what I see in my art program. So I've wondered if GC should be turned off on skin maps so I tried an experiment where I set the color map to custom GC of 1.00 and something bizarre happened. The maps I did that on in the test render, well, they rendered nearly white.

I do not know what Poser 2012 is doing exactly (if it is different than 2010), but if your texture looks too pale, by setting the gamma to 1 on the image-map node, things will only get worse. Think of it as render GC making everything brighter and importing images doing exactly the opposite (making everything darker). So disabling gamma on the import, but leaving it on for the renderer, makes everything brighter without making it darker first.

Also knowing what your art program actually does, might be of some help. Understanding what a renderer does with GC can be tricky sometimes, but knowing what e.g. photoshop or gimp do with GC can be almost inscrutable (at least in my opinion). If unsure, i usually try the whole process (from exporting the image to rendering it) with a simple 50%-grey image and hope that i get the 50% grey out again.

Quote - It was weird. And btw, I was using BB's light meter in my tests, so my lights weren't overblown, it's the render GC 'sucking the life out' of my texture. And sure I know that after a render you can do all sorts of corrections in an art program, but if you're making something for the market place, no post work is allowed in the demo images. So I do ask, shouldn't skin maps be anti-GC'ed? And if so, I don't know the nodes for doing such. (running and ducking now)

Most of the times they should be gamma corrected (because they contain something like a photograph of some skin). Either you enable the gamma on the image-map node (by setting it to 2.2 or 'use from render settings), or you can use the gamma node or color-math node i am sure there are various posts around here about that.

Do not forget that if your skin shader contains additionally a specular component (which is usually white), the result will get more desaturated and brighter than the image texture alone.