Looking for any and all suggestions!

[P.Sue]

Hopefully I'll do this right. Here are two images, one a before and the other more of a during. I've made them both jpeg. I was mostly working on the skin here and skipped the shadow and flyaway hair. My questions are...what is the best way to remove the shadow and those flyaway hairs? What about the lips...making them smooth or glossy. I'm just getting going on doing this kind of retouching on computer so I know that there is much to learn, I've got printouts all over the place and downloaded tutorials to keep me busy for weeks! I'm a bit overwhelmed by the vast amount of expertise show here and any of your suggestions will be very much appreciated!
Thanks,
Pen

[P.Sue]

I know there must be something I can do better!

[Wolfman]

I took the liberty of doing a little work on your original. In your after shot, you used blur and too much of it. If you search this site you will find tutorials on dodging & burning to improve skin tone. In the upper levels of beauty retouching, blurring is a no, no.... D&B is the way to go. It takes a lot of practice to get the feel.

I put your image on a new background. I used a channels selection to get the hair selected and it seemed to do away with the frizzys.

I'm not an expert, but I have been practicing and trying the methods recommended by some of the top people on this site. I would suggest you practice the D&B method and of course basic cleaning up with cloning or spot healing first and color adjustment.

My try isn't perfect, but an improvement.

[P.Sue]

I have seen gaussian blur used quite a bit in many of the tutorials I've looked at, esp when used with High Pass. That's what I did here but maybe I was heavy handed with the ol' mouse. Thank you for your suggestions and your try. I'm not too fond of the background color but otherwise it looks very nice. I've not done much with D&B but I will check out some tutorials as you have suggested and see what I can learn from them!

For anyone else, feel free to work on this, too.
Pen