I'm more than likely going to make them worse! A few bags under the eyeballs tells half the story in a good picture.

Yup! I'm doing that kind of work regularly.
This guy works well, but nothing exceptional. Probably most of the skin is done with stamp tool, or sometimes adjustement layers with brushes especially for details like freckles. Sure it looks spectacular the fact his model appearing first on his site have ugly skin & ordinary face. The transformation is major. But most of the time the models are a lot better than that, with pretty skin, but always need to be retouched. Sometimes less, sometimes more. I'll show later some exemples of what I worked on recently...

COOOOL! I'm looking forward to this!!