Retouching Portraits

I haven't added many portrait examples so here's one I was processing last night. The thing that struck me about this shot was the size of the girl's eyes and how the catch lights really add a sense of depth to them. I was also practising some air brushing techniques to make the skin really flawless, but still maintaining the dimple. There are thousands or retouching techniques out there but I'll give a quick run through of what I did.
Firstly I removed any obvious spots and marks, very quick using either the spot healer in photoshop or the spot remove tool in lightroom. The next part takes the longest, I use the healing brush, always on a new layer (ctrl J to duplicate the original layer) and sample from really clear bits of skin and repeatedly go over any blotchy parts. I then duplicate this layer and do some dodging in the eyes, on the whites and the irides (plural for iris apparently, I never knew that). Anyway after brightening the eyes a touch I then ran a surface blur filter (under filter, blur) with about 15 for radius and pixels, the result of this will look very odd so you must then reduce the opacity of that blurred layer to get back the detail in from the layer below. To selectivity sharpen areas ie the eyes and the lips just add a layer mask and paint in black (or grey) over the parts you don't need smoothing out. That's pretty much it for retouching, the key is usually less is more, you can always measure your progress by alt clicking on the eye next to the background layer this will reveal your original photo only.