I am pretty new to the retouching thing, and I wanted to get a critique, and maybe some helpful hints.
One is a photo I fixed for a friend of a friend, with the before and after attached. You can see the photo I started with was pretty poor quality. The skin is a little too smooth, but There wasn't a lot of capture of detail in the original photo. I played with the colors, to get rid of the yellow, a bit of sharpening, getting rid of the background.. etc.
The second set is a photo I took of a friend (also a beginner there!) and then an edit I did just for fun to change her make up and etc. I changed make up colors, eye color, edited the shape of her eyebrows, changed her skin tone and obviously did a poor job of burning out the background

I also changed the shape of the eyeliner slightly.
So yeah, that's it for now. I am using Photoshop CS.