1st time skin softening

Hi all, this is my very first attempt at skin softening/smoothing. I'm having a slight problem with the skin tone that's under the model's hair. How do most of you tackle a problem like this? at the moment I'm trying to zoom in as much as I can to get in between the hair but its taking forever. Here is the before and after pics. any C&C will be greatly appreciated.

thanks.

Before

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just in case someone wants to see the raw version str8 from the camera.

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I found skin softening hard at the beginning. I find that your results have the skin looking more blurred than softened and smoothed. I use a method that was posted here by the member mizuno. You can find in this forum. I took a copy of your original and came up with the following. I first applied a hue/saturation adjustment layer to come up with what looked right for me on my monitor.

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wow...very nice..the tutorial I followed was a different one posted on this forum. I will give mizuno's tut a try. thanks...oh, is zooming in as far as you can the best/only way to get the skin tone that's within the hair?

A couple of clicks with the imagenomic portraiture Plugin - it's worth every cent, if not for the results then for the time saved.

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i'm going to look into that plugin...not too shabby...lol
thanks

wow they both came out nice! imagenomic portraiture Plugin came out super nice tho. how much that cost?