fixing faces

[Gre2eneyes]

Just some advice needed....simple advice please....I am not too advanced in photo editing ...YET!

I have a picture I took of a bride (and her mother and grandmother) at her wedding this summer. There was a strand of hair across her face that went across her left eye, her nose and her cheeks. Using the clone tool I have managed to fix it so the hair is gone, and I repaired her eye and took her face pretty well. When I zoom the picture back to normal size it looks pretty good, but when its zoomed out the skin looks a bit funny, not as smooth as it should. I was wondering what type of editing would typically be done at that stage to smooth it all out and give it a nice look. I cannot post the photo here as I do not have permission from the bride.
Thanks for your advice
judy

[Aussie Nan]

Hopefully you will get more replies to this one Judy, as I am not a guru on getting skin right. Some people on the forum use plug ins to great effect, and will probably tell you more about them.

I would try the healing brush first (on it's own layer so you can adjust opacity if needed).

If I'm not happy with that, then I would do a slight gaussian blur on the whole image, and with the eraser bring back details where I want it. All on duplicate layers of course. Or you could select the faces and put them on their own layer, do the blur just on them, and then erase the eyes, lips etc to show the sharpness.

But as I said, someone else will probably give you a better approach.