Photolab is good, except for these few things

[Egregius ([Greg] (Micro 4/3 + Win11))]

In this forum, there’s a fairly long history of reported problems with Canon color rendering in PhotoLab. See here, for example:

Colour cast on Canon 90D .CR3 files

I kind of remembered that someone testing newer Canon cameras said, that color rendering had changed in comparison to earlier models. Therefore, I downloaded two files from dpreview.com, a .CR2 and a .CR3 file with shots taken off of the standard test scene and opened them in several raw editors. I found slight differences in color rendering as seen in DPP, Lr and DPL. It seems that rendering of colors in CR3 files is less saturated than in .CR2 files. If we exclude differences in lighting, we …

It might help you to try different options for the Color Rendering adjustment palette, to see what produces the best results for portraits made with a Canon 5D. The default renderings you’re using are, as you say, too dark and not protecting the flesh tones properly. Fortunately or unfortunately, the options you have for color rendering are vast.

If you’re not already doing so, try experimenting with Smart Lighting adjustments, too.

Output sharpening complaints also go back a long way. You might want to look at the following feature request from 2020, which to date has accumulated 71 votes and many comments which might be helpful to you:

Output sharpenning in photolab directly

currently photolab compensates for optical defects, notably sharpness defects related to optics, demosaicing, etc. (pre sharpening) the output sharpness depending on the medium (paper, screen, etc…) is of course dependent on each medium, image size, etc… this output sharpness is currently being processed by nik sharpener pro. would it be possible to integrate it into photolab (raw flow) to apply it directly when exporting photos instead of having to go through nik sharpener pro (or lightroom …