1：
An overly aggressive approach to portrait photography that results in a “wax figure” look.
2：
I am certain that the vast majority of photos are taken during the day; what is the actual proportion of night shots? Could the default presets be optimized for the lower ISO ranges typical of daytime shooting—covering roughly ISO 100 to 3200 (indoors, outdoors, or overcast conditions)—rather than defaulting to processing images shot at tens of thousands of ISO?
Welcome to the user forum. In other words if your post is aimed at DxO, you need submit your feedback to them via the ‘other requests’ link on this page:
https://support.dxo.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
As a user, I would say:
1:
Most of the presets, i.e. not just the Portrait one, in PhotoLab are less than ideal. For that reason most, if not all, users that frequent this forum have created their own Custom preset to use as their default starting point.
2:
The noise reduction algorithms in PhotoLab work wonders on high ISO images but they do little harm to images shot at more normal values. Again though, if the presets supplied by DxO are not to your taste, simple create your own preset to use as your default starting point.
I’m not a professional portrait photographer but most of my photos are of people (family) and many of them are during the day and at lower ISOs.
I have found that Pure Raw 6 with default settings treats all of them appropriately. However the lens sharpness setting is adjustable, from 0-200% with the default being 100%.
Something that caught me out in my workflow, if I output to DNG and then continue editing in a proper editor, I had to disable lens corrections in my editing software to prevent the image being double lens corrected, as that did have an adverse effect and it oversharpened my portraits.
That was also my first thought after reading the op.
You need to disable lenscorrections and set sharpening and NR to zero in your editor as a starting point. (Almost) all editors start with a certain amount of sharpening as default, if you’re not zeroing that after using PR images will look oversharpened/crunchy, essentially you’re sharpening twice.
If you send a DNG file from PureRAW to LR Classic, this automatically disables lens, noise, and sharpening corrections in LR (also applies to ACR in Photoshop).