Within the picture control menu on the D7200 are the sliders for 'sharpness' and 'clarity'.
I realise it's entirely subjective (and as I understand it, increasing sharpness accentuates noise while increasing clarity reduces color accuracy) but what settings are people using in what situations?
I've suggested for a long time that when shooting JPG you increase the Sharpness setting in the individual Picture Controls, from the strangely low default setting of 3, to 6 or 7. That being said, I've never heard increasing sharpness increases digital noise and unless I'm totally misunderstanding both concepts, I don't see how it could. Sharpening, really, is a sort optical illusion that uses contrast values/edge detection to make edges appear clearer and cleaner by increasing contrast AT detected edges. The drawback of over-sharpening is a photo that simply LOOKS over-sharpened, not an overall increase in digital noise.
Clarity is a simple contrast adjustment/mid-tones boost, and I don't see how that would affect color accuracy (but I'm willing to be corrected in either case). In my experience, JPG's out of Nikon camera's using the most common picture profiles, such as Standard, tend to be a little on the contrast-y side to begin with and that extra contrast, I think, can make skin imperfections more pronounced. To correct this I would dial back the Clarity in Camera RAW. This maintained the overall sharpness but tended to make skin look a little smoother and "nicer" overall. In fact if you dial it waaay back Camera RAW you can get a nice, soft, dreamy sort of effect but I'm not sure how that would look using the in-camera Clarity setting.
