Delicious retouch 4 Help

I remember him saying before in a post on MM that there was over 100 steps. Dont know if he was making it more dramatic or not.

 

From the video on his website it looks to me like frequency separation, colormatch with curves and blendmodes, then some more blurring with dust and scratch filter, more curves - the eyes sharpening looks like curves blendmodes and unsharp mask/high pass filter. There's also a color mask being applied.. Then just some masking to mask it all in.

I would have done it with frequency separation with worklayers on clipping masks to make it non destructive. Then I would have used curves and smart sharpen on the white in eyes and curves and high pass on the iris to make it pop. The hair and eyebrows I would have masked with select and mask, to retouch and enhance..

I would have sampled colors on my way, or maybe made a color palette from samples, and used it with clipping masks. Maybe coloring/colordodging through luminosity masks either from the select color range or from a luminosity mask panel. Used smart sharpen and high pass to enhance details - high pass I would probably have used with overlay or vivid light blend modes.

To finish it off I would make two curve layers for burn and dodgeing and some curves for color toning, which I would have masked in.