And also one of my first retouching attempts :blush:
Thanks to Superkoax (& his endless retouching thread) for the image of his girlfriend that got me interested in reading up on the techniques & also to Ray12 for his excellent Dior tutorial :)
C&C welcome & appreciated (I know it's a bit extreme & won't be to everyones taste)

Original & retouched from a recent modelling shoot - I was standing in the background to get some natural light shots rather than the high-key that the others were shooting - image was not as good as I wanted it to be & I was going to bin it until I found this forum.

Your Retouch looks a little greenish/yellow to me.
My first version is just bringing out the shadows some
and the second is my version of a high key that it looks like you were going for

Moomike - this is an amazing post. WOW!!! This is flawless!!! I'm completely stunned that taking what started as an amazing photo - and making it even better could be possible. I just came back onto this site, and seeing a photo retouch like this makes me hopeful that could do something like this one day.
Thanks for posting who was able to help you get this far as I'm going to go read up on that information myself.
Take care, and feel free to look at my recent thread that I posted Creative Interpretations: free for all....
:D Jillian

Thanks for the feedback Baldy & Jillian, very much appreciated.
The yellowish/green tint is pretty much standard with the way I process my images & I'm trying to slowly but surely (more slowly to be honest *lol*) put together more of a unified look to my portfolio as it's a bit all over the place at the moment.
Your edits have certainly brought out a great deal of detail in the skin & that's something I'll have to look into in much more detail (no terrible pun intended)

Thanks again for the ideas & the feedback :)

Feedback is what I'm best at right now.
How long did it take you to retouch that photo?

It took me a couple of hours on & off between projects I'm working on at the moment. There was a lot of trial & error involved as it was only the second time I'd tried a proper serious retouching job (1st was of Superkoax's girlfriend) I was very happy with the pore detail in the final version. My normal processing is quite moody so I'm probably going to have to tone it down for most of these kind of images.

One quick from me :)

Mookie, here is my critic.

You need to keep a skin texture in your retouch. it's too easy to get away with blur and have skin that looks unrealistique. if you look at the cosmetic advertising in fashion magazine like vogue, you will see a lot of details. I understand you didn't have the best image to work with in the first place to keep the details in. also the color is not good for skin tone (is your monitor calibrated with a puck? like eye-one). Beacause if it's the way you process all the time, it doesn't look right on my LCD!

I think I would tend to agree with zogdart. The skin on your retouch looks a bit too retouched, almost like plastic. I would recommend looking more into the dodge and burn techniques littered all over these forums and use that as a main retouching technique. Only use blurring extremely selectively and at very low opacities, to even out shadows and tones and the like. If you can tell that you've blurred, you've done too much. Hope that helps!