During some well deserve down time, I usually venture into photo retouching. My weapon of choice is Adobe Photoshop CC versus Lightroom. Reason being, while attending school as a Graphic designer, Photoshop was the standard for image manipulation, not saying Photoshop is better than Lightroom, it's just my preference and I'm glad I got that out of the way. One thing about photo retouching, you want the photo to look as natural as possible, but how do you accomplish this? Very subtle changes. Birthmarks/beauty marks are personal, be careful if you remove them, you might offend your client, so in essence, talk with you client versus jumping the gun. Here is an example of a before and after.

So you can see, the image was color corrected and some blemishes were removed. I also enhanced the lips, skin and eyes, just to give them a nice and even glow. The goal is not to retouch all your images, in fact, your goal as a photographer is to limit your retouching process. Reason being, retouching is or can be time consuming and time cost money. However, every now and then I get a request from a client to retouch particular a photo that has some significance to them. That's what it's all about, making a difference! As you can see, it's the same person nothing drastic. I hope you enjoyed the retouch.